Posts by Alastair Tempest

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows in Africa dropped by 28% over the first 6 months of 2020, according to an UNCTAD report (October 27). The situation is mainly due to…

COVID has stimulated major moves forward in Fintech throughout the continent. In November, I was a panelist at the African Fintech Summit on the Ecommerce panel (video clip HERE ). The father of mobile…

We reported early last year on the plan to launch a new currency to replace the CFA franc used by several countries in West Africa. This now may not happen for at…

The International Chamber of Commerce (ICC) has launched an Africa Trade initiative. The Ecommerce Forum Africa (EFA) is involved in this initiative and has been invited to sit on the…

Linked to the lack of IDs is the lack of addresses. One of the major challenges for ecommerce in Africa is the lack of addresses. Jumia reported that up to…

The EC has proposed a European-wide platform that helps resolve disputes between consumers and European e-merchants. The Online Dispute Resolution (ODR) platform is provided by the European Commission to make online shopping…

Mastercard data shows that almost half of all spend in recent months was online, for every $100 spent in MEA, nearly half ($47) was spent on ecommerce in May compared to $35 in February 2020. Earlier…

Business Insider Intelligence’s latest report, The Global SMB Neobanks Report, shows that digital-only banks with industry-leading capabilities that do not operate physical branches or rely on legacy back-ends (known as Neobanks) have recently increased their business rapidly. Europe has…

Michelle Chivunga and I have just completed a paper on Digital Disruption in Africa for SAIIA (https://saiia.org.za/research/digital-disruption-in-africa-mapping-innovations-for-the-african-free-trade-area-in-post-covid-times/). Inevitably we had to tackle the issue of Data Sovereignty, which covers 2…

The international policy research body, CUTS, has just produced a very readable report on ecommerce in COVID times – http://www.cuts-geneva.org/pdf/KP2020-Study-Fast_Forward_E-Commerce.pdf and UNCTAD released a study on ecommerce mainly in the…