Tolu Olasoji While it can boast of the largest number of startups in the Africa tech ecosystem, Nigeria lags in other important metrics, a new report ranking the continent’s major tech sectorsasserts. The report, compiled by fDi Intelligence, a specialist division of the Financial Times, in collaboration with research company Briter Bridges, aims to “map the continent’s nascent tech ecosystems and explore their potential moving forward.” Investment in the continent’s start-up space is tiny in comparison to the global north. For example, US startups raised $156.2 billion in venture capital last year, per Pitchbook. By comparison, African startups have raised…

It was post-covid. In your business: fewer meetings and more connections. We are all happy to return, little by little, to “normality”: to the distant world in which we all lived in 2019, which now appears in the collective subconscious as ancient history. Just as 9/11 changed the world in many ways, the global Covid-19 crisis transformed the way we relate to each other. The plain and simple reality is that we will never return to "normal". Rather, we will enter a new era where the parameters of relationship, the form of communication and the hierarchies of social value are…

Central Bank of Nigeria has adopted the Nafex rate as the government’s official exchange rate for the naira, effectively devaluing the currency by 7.6 per cent. The bank posted the I&E rate on Monday on its website two weeks after it deleted the previous official fixed rate of 379 naira. The currency exchanged 410.25 for a dollar on the relatively flexible Nafex or Investors and Exporters window. This is coming almost two weeks after CBN erased from its website the exchange rate that for about a year was seen as the government’s official rate. In March, CBN had denied devaluing…

Monetary policy committee of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has voted to retain the monetary policy rate at 11.5 percent. The committee also retained the liquidity ratio at 30 percent and cash reserve ratio (CRR) at 27.5 percent. Godwin Emefiele, CBN governor, announced the committee’s decision on Tuesday at the end of a two-day meeting at the CBN headquarters, noted that the economic recovery is “still fragile”. “MPC made the decision to hold all policy parameters constant. Committee thus decided by a unanimous vote to retain monetary policy rate at 11.5%,” Emefiele said. “MPC voted to retain assymetric corridor…