Forbes Africa

HAVE YOU NOTICED? AS LOGOPHILES WILL TELL you, the last two years have thrown up dozens of new words that have now gained currency and earned place in the dictionaries of the world. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has now officially included ‘hy

THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE HOLIDAY season was my visit to Expo 2020 Dubai. Delayed by Covid, this was one of the long overdue events on my calendar since it began in October last year. I had visited the site in 2019 with Manal Al Bayat, the Executive Vice

WHO DOES NOT LOVE A LITTLE DRAMA? And mix that with one of the biggest reality TV franchises (The Real Housewives) in the world and the queens of the coastal city of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and you may hit a goldmine. Just ask the star

As the world moves into year three of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the work-from-home model has become the ‘new normal’. Cheapflights, a travel fare metasearch engine, has released its ‘Work From Wherever Index’ ranking 111 countries where travelers

Édouard Mendy (29), the professional goalkeeper for the Premier League club Chelsea and the Senegal national team, was named the Best FIFA Men’s Goalkeeper for 2021. “It is a very special moment for me, and for my family,” Mendy said in Cameroon, whe

Every year, to observe International Women’s Day on March 8, the FORBES WOMAN AFRICA Leading Women Summit is held showcasing a powerful community of female champions, barrier-breakers, goal-diggers and visionary voices. Now in its seventh edition, th

The 2021 FORBES AFRICA 30 Under 30 list-maker, Antonio Depina (26), known for his mobile app bringing talented professional basketball players closer to their dreams, especially in Africa, has now also launched a ride-hailing app named Zoomly. The fo

AS COVID-19 VARIANTS SURGE across the world, so does the contentious concomitant conversation: should countries and companies make vaccines mandatory? Politicians are faced with both increasing pressure and protests against the impending policy aroun

AFRICA’S BILLIONAIRES ARE RICHER than they have been in years. As a group, the continent’s 18 billionaires are worth an estimated $84.9 billion – a 15% increase from 12 months ago and the largest tally since at least 2015. Soaring stock prices from N

The EU-African SME Summit 2021 took place on October 21 and 22. It was a hybrid event that saw a strong participation from Africa and Europe. Through digital means, 65 top-level speakers came together to spell out an SME Agenda for the economic coope

SAM DARWISH is no stranger to adversity. He spent his early childhood trying to survive the hardships brought on by the brutal civil war that gripped the West Asian country of Lebanon that he called home. Today, he is Chairman and CEO of IHS Towers,

JIHAN ABASS, THE 26-YEAR-OLD FOUNDER and CEO of Lami, an insurance technology firm in Kenya, once had a chance conversation with a waiter at a restaurant in Nairobi who ruefully told her he did not have insurance. She then pondered the transformative

IF YOU HAVE A PLAN, DOES IT MATTER THAT YOU HAVE NOT FINISHED SCHOOL? Ask Nikhil Kamath, the 35-year-old co-founder of wealth management firms Zerodha and True Beacon and India’s youngest billionaire as per Forbes India’s 2021 India Rich List. The b

AFRICAN FASHION IS MORE THAN JUST patterns and traditional garb, and contrary to popular opinion, is modern and evolving. This is how fashion entrepreneur Nisha Kanabar, a fourth generation Tanzanian and graduate of the Parsons School of Design in Ne

IN AKOBO VILLAGE IN THE HISTORIC Gambella region, the sun shone bright, the forest was green and the children laughed with gay abandon. The men reared cattle and the women tended to their kitchen gardens. The ponds had plenty of fish and the people w

IN MARCH 2020, AS COVID-19 began to spread, OpenSea founders Devin Finzer and Alex Atallah held a gut-check phone call. Their five-person startup had built a platform on which users could create, buy and sell all sorts of nonfungible tokens (NFTs)—co

EQT CORP. IS A venerable player in the energy business, going back 133 years to the earliest days of gas drilling in Pennsylvania, with headquarters in a granite-and glass tower in Pittsburgh. But you’d never guess that from a visit to the office of

Just two years ago, exporting American liquefied natural gas (LNG), most of it produced by fracking, was a terrible business, with most exporters barely breaking even. Now, thanks to a pandemic-induced energy crisis, it’s a license to print money. He

Türeci’s name will forever be synonymous with the coronavirus pandemic and the vaccine she helped pioneer at BioNTech, the company she cofounded in 2008. A doctor and immunologist by training—for decades, she researched innovative ways to treat cance

“THUS IN DREAMS DO THE DEAD return to you,” writes South African author Damon Galgut of Rachel Swart, the spectral focus of his 2021 Booker Prize winning novel The Promise. Spanning four decades in the life of a white Pretorian family, the novel trac

TECHNOLOGY ISN’T ALL DOOM AND gloom. What it is doing, however, is shifting what it means to be human through how we interact with the world and each other. This social connectivity has a real impact on our mental wellbeing and that’s not always a ba

INSTEAD OF WALKING AROUND AND LOOKING FOR an information desk, a friendly robot who can communicate in multiple languages is making its way around an airport terminal, shopping center or hospital reception. And when arriving at a hotel, there’s now a

THE TRAUMA UNIT OF SOUTH AFRICA’S reputed Chris Hani Baragwanath Hospital is usually abuzz with urgent activity. Gurneys rush back and forth with bleeding patients as medical staff shout instructions over beeping machines. Overwhelming is a mild way

IN THE SHADOW OF THE MAJESTIC TABLE Mountain in Cape Town in the confines of the BioCiTi laboratory, scientists of Mzansi Meat are hard at work, making use of stem cells from live, unharmed animals to grow something novel – meat you can eat. Over a t

IN THE ROLLING FOOTHILLS OF THE Maluti Mountains surrounding the Katse Dam in Lesotho, the seeds of a green revolution are being sown. The high altitude, facilitative legislation, cultural history and innovation of the country are coming together to

LONDON, AT ANY TIME OF YEAR, CAN BE stubbornly, oppressively grey; it is not unusual to wonder, after weeks of overcast skies, what grudge the sun holds against this part of our world. So when an explosion of lime green flies chattering across a city

GROWING UP AS A PRINCESS IN THE Mulaudzi-Mulikiti clan of Venda in South Africa’s Limpopo province, it is expected that young girls will take up their royal duties and give in to their destiny as a member of the regal line. But Rhoda Mulaudzi chose a

THERE ARE FEW MEN WHO KNOW MORE ABOUT African football than veteran French coach Claude Le Roy, who has worked on the continent for close to four decades, earning a stellar reputation for his services to the game. His longevity is hugely impressive,

WAKING UP TO A PRIDE OF 19 LIONS RESTING after a night’s hunt less than 300 yards from my campsite was an experience that will be forever etched in my mind. This local pride had been awaiting the arrival of wildebeests to the birthing grounds of Ndut