Movemeback Pulse

Nigeria’s fintech sector is primarily focused on payments and consumer lending, These segments have experienced fast growth in the past 2 years, partly owing to the central bank’s financial inclusion drive and favourable regulatory policies, including revised Know your Customer requirements and incentives to accelerate development of agent networks. Whilst customer adoption has been primarily driven by increased access and convenience, trust still has some way to go, as 67% of banking customers, say that they trust their bank more than fintech.

Kenya’s top judge has recommended the dissolution of Parliament, after Kenya failed to enact laws on gender parity. Kenya’s constitution requires a minimum 33% gender balance for both elective and appointive positions; however female representation stands at 22% and 31% in the lower and upper houses respectively. Africa is increasingly a role model in the political empowerment of women, with Rwanda leading the world with a 61% female representation in parliament from just 18% in the 1990s, partially achieved by reserving 30% of elected posts for women. This recommendation from Kenya’s top judge demonstrates the level of political will needed to maintain this trend.

Baseline healthcare & disease protection

Scientists in Nigeria have developed a new Covid-19 vaccine candidate, but human trials are being delayed due to a lack of funds. The cost of developing a vaccine from research and discovery to product registration is estimated to be between $200-$500mn per vaccine. With 51% of the future doses of leading Covid-19 vaccine candidates already bought by a small group of wealthy nations representing just 13% of the world’s population, can African countries come together to fund African-led research initiatives, including Covid-19 vaccine development? 

Effective internal and regional security, and foreign policy

Botswana plans to teach the Swahili language in its schools, with the aim of bolstering intra-African trade with Swahili-speaking African countries. This comes after 16 southern African countries agreed to adopt Swahili as among the 4 official languages. Whilst most African education systems focus on the use of international languages, only ~10-15% of the population is fluent in these languages, resulting in communication gaps between the formal education system and its social environment. Expanding the adoption of widely used African languages such as Swahili can aid economic progress on The Continent by expanding the potential for cross-regional understanding and collaboration.

End-to-end value chain capture

Nigeria is set to end fertiliser importation by 2023 as it plans to plug its 2mn metric tonnes annual deficit with local production from its now 33+ fertiliser plants. With ~70% of Nigeria’s population engaged in agriculture production, and the industry contributing ~25% to total GDP (compared to oil’s share 8.6%), agriculture has the potential to provide a larger share of annual export revenue, reducing Nigeria’s economic dependency on volatile oil prices. Improving the availability of affordable, quality fertiliser would increase crop yield and may help achieve this, as 45% of Nigerian farming households use fertilizer (more than their West African counterparts).  

Essential infrastructure, personal living-space & utilities

South Sudan has set a $10,000 ceiling on the amount of money outbound travellers can take out of the country, in a bid to minimise cash outflows. The move comes after the Central Bank of South Sudan’s August announcement that its foreign reserves were at their lowest point since the signing of the 2018 peace deal to end over 6 years of conflict. Countries such as Angola, Nigeria and Zimbabwe have previously imposed capital controls in order to shore up their foreign exchange reserves in the face of devaluing currencies. For sustained economic recovery, such restrictions should be backed by a decisive use of other policy levers, such as fiscal and monetary stimuli.

Exporting culture & identity

Fintech usage in Nigeria increased by 54% in 6 months leading up to Jan-Feb 2020, driven largely by the growing number of agents, customer education, transparency in pricing and ease of money withdrawal. In response to market needs, more firms are branching out from the predominant payment and lending services into micro-investment, wealth management, peer to peer transfer and insurtech. Whilst Nigeria’s fintech sector is buzzing, attracting 25% of all money raised by African tech startups in 2019, only 40% of the population is financially included - presenting many more opportunities before Nigeria reaches is financial inclusion target of 95% 

High value skills development and talent repatriation

The World Trade Organisation and Google have partnered to host a Tourism Acceleration Program in SSA, aimed at developing innovation and digital transformation skills in the tourism sector. Pre-Covid estimates put Africa's tourism industry at $262bn by 2030; however $55bn in travel and tourism revenue was lost in the first three months of the pandemic alone. With tourism representing 9% of global trade for Africa and 1 in 10 jobs (directly and indirectly), training in market intelligence and data insights may help drive consumer insights, digital transformation and innovations in the context of Covid-19, and contribute to sustainable economic recovery.

Scaleable energy access

Africa possesses a huge onshore wind potential, of almost 18,000 Terawatt-hours (TWh) per annum - enough to satisfy the entire Continent’s electricity demand of ~700TWh annually, 250 times over, according to a new study. Despite the huge potential, Africa’s global share of the installed wind turbine capacity is just ~1% compared to ~40% in Asia and the Pacific and ~21% in North America. In order to sufficiently tap The Continent’s wind energy, African countries can capitalise on small wind turbines in addition to large wind farms. A small wind turbine has a rotor size of up to 15m in diameter and can generate enough power to sustain around 15 domestic houses.