A Cabanga Africa Publication
Africa Thinks Here
On-the-ground business intelligence in South Africa & Eswatini, since July 2019.
Section
Southern Africa's trade corridors are usually described in the vocabulary of ports, rail lines and one-stop border posts. What is missing from most infrastructure inventories of those corridors is the built health footprint required to serve the people who...
A lodge developer in northern Tanzania can build to any standard the market demands, but the asset is only as valuable as the road, airstrip and border post that connect it to demand. SADC's approval of a ten-year Tourism Programme raises an infrastructure...
A border post is infrastructure, whether or not it appears on an infrastructure ministry's project list. It has queuing capacity, throughput limits, and a physical footprint that determines how much freight can cross it in a day — the same variables that govern a...
Industrial policy is, in the end, a claim about land, ports and power — and on 17 August 2019, the Southern African Development Community made that claim in treaty form when it adopted the Protocol on Industry. The contradiction property investors have to price is...
A more favourable regulatory environment for cross-border investment is only half of what a firm needs before it commits capital to a warehouse in Ndola, a distribution hub near Beira, or a logistics park outside Gaborone. The other half is physical: functioning...
A border post is, in engineering terms, a piece of built infrastructure like any other: land, a structure, access roads, weighbridges, holding yards and utility connections. What makes SADC's one-stop border post model a property and infrastructure story rather...
A financial inclusion strategy sounds like a paper exercise conducted in ministries and central banks. It is not. Reaching small and medium enterprises, youth and women entrepreneurs who currently sit outside the formal financial system requires somewhere for that...
SADC's 38th Summit of Heads of State and Government, held in Windhoek this month, confirmed the Union of the Comoros as the bloc's sixteenth member state — a political and institutional milestone that sits awkwardly against a physical fact: Comoros is not...
A factory is only as useful as the road, rail line and port that connect it to a market, and Namibia's case for industrial relevance rests almost entirely on infrastructure it does not fully control end to end. That is the tension underneath the third SADC...