Africa

1. Africa responds to US tariffs
2. Kenya’s tariff test
3. Mobilizing African resources
4. US scraps South Sudan visas
5. Data centers boom
6. Ivorian bank grows
7. Spotify royalties
8. The Week Ahead

Tributes pour in after the death of Malian singer Amadou Bagayoko.

Africa responds to US tariffs

Africa’s biggest economies adopted contrasting strategies in responding to US President Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs. Washington last week imposed levies of between 10% and 50% on sub-Saharan African countries: Nigeria’s central bank responded quickly by selling nearly $200 million to prop up the naira, with policymakers arguing that a drop in crude oil prices alongside Washington’s huge new duties presented “new dynamics for oil-exporting countries.”

Pretoria, by contrast, held off on immediate action. President Cyril Ramaphosa said his government was considering the implications of the tariffs but would not “act out of spite.” South Africa, a member of the BRICS bloc, said it would “forge global alliances” to diversify its export destinations while Trade Minister Parks Tau told the Financial Times that African nations should pivot towards other markets, including China.

Others on the continent — Lesotho, Madagascar, and Mauritius, are the “most vulnerable,” according to the Washington-based think tank Center for Global Development — have fewer options. “Our best hope is that Africa experts in US agencies can persuade the architects of this scheme to remedy this inexplicably cruel situation,” two CGD authors wrote.

— Alexis Akwagyiram

Kenya rate decision amid uncertainty

Kenya’s central bank will likely cut interest rates this week, bolstering an economy that some economists say may be a rare beneficiary of US tariffs. Kenya’s monetary policy committee cut its main interest rate for the fourth meeting in a row to 10.75% in February.

Goldman Sachs, in a note, said it expects the bank to continue with its policy easing cycle, cutting its benchmark rate by 50 basis points. Charlie Robertson, author of The Time-Travelling Economist, told Semafor he also expected a rate cut. He said the US tariffs would likely benefit Africa’s oil-importing economies, like Kenya. “Oil importers with relatively high debt get a double benefit from the shock of Trump’s tariffs. The energy import bill will fall and it is good for inflation,” he said.

— Alexis

Mobilizing Africa’s resources

It’s time for Africa to “revolutionize its development financing approach” by harnessing its vast domestic resources, a former Senegal economy minister writes in a new column for Semafor.

The narrative of a “poor” Africa is contradicted by reality, argues Amadou Hott, saying the continent holds $2.5 trillion in liquid investable wealth from high-net-worth individuals and about $2 trillion of assets under management of pension funds, sovereign wealth funds, and insurance companies.

This wealth could be used to plug the over $400 billion annual financing gap the African Development Bank identified last year to meet Africa’s education, energy, innovation, and productive infrastructure shortfalls. “It is time for us to focus on the domestic mobilization of local resources with innovative long-term capital vehicles to finance Africa’s projects,” Hott writes.

US revokes South Sudan visas

The US government revoked all visas granted to South Sudanese passport holders over the African country’s apparent unwillingness to receive deported citizens.

The visa revocations can be reviewed “when South Sudan is in full cooperation,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said, but efforts will be put in place to prevent South Sudanese passport holders from receiving any new visas or entering the US.

The move comes as tensions rise in South Sudan between President Salva Kiir and his former partners in a power-sharing deal. The United Nations has warned that the country is on the brink of civil war as a result of the tensions.

James Mwangi, Group CEO, Equity Group Holdings, will join top global leaders at Semafor’s 2025 World Economy Summit, taking place April 23-25, 2025, in Washington, DC. As the first major gathering since the new US administration took office, the summit will feature on-the-record discussions with 100+ CEOs.

Bringing together leaders from both the public and private sectors — including congressional leaders and global finance ministers — the three-day summit will explore the forces shaping the global economy and geopolitics. Across 12 sessions, it will foster transformative, news-making conversations on how the world’s decision-makers are tackling economic growth in increasingly uncertain times.

April 23-25 | Washington, DC | Learn More

Investing in data centers

The amount the International Finance Corporation is investing in Raxio, an Africa-focused data center developer. The loan from the IFC, the World Bank’s private-sector lending arm, is aimed at doubling Raxio’s offering of data centers in sub-Saharan Africa, boosting the stock of infrastructure needed to drive the continent’s digital economy ambitions. Since it began operations in 2018 and set up its first data center in Uganda three years later, Raxio has built facilities in Côte d’Ivoire, DR Congo, Ethiopia, and Mozambique. It is due to open new centers in Angola and Tanzania this year.

Ivorian digital bank reaches 1M users

Ivorian digital bank Djamo said it now has 1 million active users, four years after it began operations to take on Francophone West Africa’s established commercial banks and mobile money providers.

The Abidjan-based startup, which also operates in Senegal, raised $17 million this month, one of the largest venture capital rounds by an Ivorian startup, from a range of investors including Janngo Capital and Partech. It will deploy the new funding towards expanding on the spending, saving, investing, and borrowing services offered on its mobile app.

Financial services in French-speaking West Africa have long been dominated by banks like Societe Generale, Orange, and Ecobank. But increasing smartphone and internet access have brought competition from upstarts, notably the billion-dollar Senegalese mobile money startup Wave. Djamo shares at least one investor with Wave — the US startup accelerator Y Combinator — but hopes to better reach underserved customers by providing “access to wealth-building and fair financing opportunities,” its chief executive said.

Nigeria and S. Africa’s Spotify royalties

Musicians from Nigeria and South Africa received $59 million in royalties from Spotify in 2024 — a record high for both countries.

The amount is a small share of the $10 billion the streaming giant paid out last year but represents a sizable increase from the previous year. Nigerian artists doubled their receipts to $38 million, while South Africa’s $21 million in royalty payouts was 54% larger than in 2023.

African music has boomed globally in recent years thanks to chart-topping and Grammy Award-winning performers like Tyla, Burna Boy, Tems, and Wizkid. They have hugely increased the visibility of African artists, with hundreds of millions of user-created playlists featuring either Nigerian or South African artists, Spotify said.

The Week Ahead

• Apr. 7-8: The AU Commission, UN Economic Commission for Africa, and the African Development Bank host the 6th Africa Climate Talks in Kampala.
• Apr. 9: DR Congo and the M23 rebel group hold direct talks in Doha.
• Apr. 9: UK visa fees increase, potentially impacting African students who study and work overseas.
• Apr. 9-11: The annual Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development takes place in Kampala.
• Apr. 10: Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy visits South Africa.

Business & Macro

🇿🇲 Mobile network operator Airtel will invest $14 million to build over 150 new telecom towers in Zambia in partnership with IHS Towers.

🇰🇪 Financial services firm Sanlam Kenya is set to raise $19 million from shareholders to settle a loan from Stanbic Bank Kenya.

Climate & Energy

🌍 Germany’s Africa-focused solar energy providers EWIA Green Investments and SunErgy completed a merger. EWIA currently operates in Ghana and Nigeria, while SunErgy is in Cameroon.

🇰🇪 The Central Bank of Kenya set an 18-month timeline for commercial banks to begin disclosing climate risks connected to entities they finance.

Geopolitics & Policy

🇲🇱 Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger recalled their ambassadors to Algeria after a Malian surveillance drone was shot down for supposedly violating Algerian airspace.

🇨🇩 DR Congo changed the death sentences of three US citizens who allegedly engaged in a failed coup last year to life imprisonment.

Tech & Deals

🇿🇦 MTN Group will create a new streaming platform targeting African internet users with Synamedia, a British video software company.

🇿🇦 🇸🇳 South Africa’s online payments processor Peach Payments acquired Senegalese firm PayDunya as part of an entry into Francophone West Africa.

🇰🇪 Danish coffee company Slow Forest acquired African Coffee Roasters, a Kenyan organic coffee producer co-owned by the Danish government’s Investment Fund for Developing Countries.

Malian singer and guitarist Amadou Bagayoko died in the capital Bamako, aged 70. Tributes poured in for the blind musician, who formed the band Mali’s Blind Couple with his wife Mariam Doumbia in 1980. They won international acclaim for their music blending traditional African sounds with blues, pop, and rock. Amadou & Mariam produced over 10 award-winning albums, including Dimanche à Bamako, which received the BBC Radio Awards for World Music in 2006. Bagayoko went blind when he was 15 years old due to a congenital cataract. He studied music at Mali’s Institute for the Young Blind, where he met his future wife.

With Bilt Rewards, Ankur Jain thinks he’s hit on one of the “category-defining” startup ideas — that renters should be able to earn credit card-style rewards for paying their landlords on time and boost their credit score in the process. And the CEO is hoping to turn Bilt into a $10 billion business with fewer than 200 employees.

“Every step of the way, we keep asking ourselves, why do people throw people at problems?” he told Semafor’s Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson. “And how do you do that in a way that’s automated [instead]?”

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— Alexis Akwagyiram, Preeti Jha, Alexander Onukwue, and Yinka Adegoke.