Zimbabwe: Economic crisis hits children harder
HARARE: Every morning, six days a week, Brighton Ziruvi, 13, boards a commuter bus for a 12km trip from his low-income suburb of Dzivaresekwa in the Zimbabwean capital, Harare, to the central business district.


Conference to promote tourism in SADC region
[Luyanda Makapela] JOHANNESBURG: The Southern African Development Community (SADC) is to promote tourism in the region and raise awareness of the region's significant investment potential at a conference in Johannesburg.

AFRICA

Martin Lindstrom to kick off African tour in Joburg
The impact of subliminal advertising and the influence of neuroscience in marketing will be the subjects of an Africa-wide tour in 2009 by author and branding expert Martin Lindstrom. The book, Buyology, released last week in New York, is the result of a study on "neuromarketing," which analysed thousands of volunteers.

BOTSWANA

Festus the finest
Botswana's former president, Festus Mogae has been awarded a US$5,000,000 prize to encourage good governance. The Ibrahim Prize, set up by Sudanese businessman, Mo Ibrahim, is the most valuable individual prize in the world.

Soccer fans to get special visa for Confederations Cup, 2010
[Vivian Warby] Soccer fans wishing to apply for a visa to enter the country for next year's Confederations Cup and the 2010 FIFA World Cup will receive a special "events visa".

AFRICA

Swaziland and Moz must feel 2010 benefits - Premier
[Sharon Hammond] NELSPRUIT: Mpumalanga must improve partnerships with Swaziland and Mozambique to ensure the benefits of hosting the 2010 World Cup are felt in neighbouring countries too.

Africa, 10% of global WiMax market
It may be five or more years into the future, but the prospect of next-generation, ultra-fast 4G services has certainly piqued the interest of experts and operators.

ZIMBABWE

Illegal internet and data operators surge in Zim
[Dumisani Ndlela] Zimbabwe's internet service providers have denounced "illegal" internet and data operators, calling on members of the public to report them to the police for prosecution.

EAST AFRICA

Submarine cables integrate East Africa into global economy - IDC
PRAGUE: New submarine cables that are being laid along the east coast of Africa will bring connectivity options and related business opportunities to the region.

Google Chrome: it's not about the browser
[Steve Mabbutt] Chrome, Google's new browser, was barely out of its wrapping before Internet pundits began writing it off. As the first wave of early-adopter enthusiasts lost interest in their experiments and returned to their original browsers, so analysts began to declare Chrome dead. But there is a far more interesting set of dynamics at work. Google is not after Microsoft's share of the browser market: it's after something much bigger.

SOUTH AFRICA

Software giant launches multi-pronged assault on piracy
Software-maker Microsoft has stepped up its fight against pirated and counterfeit software with the announcement yesterday, 21 October, of the “Global Anti-Piracy Day,” a simultaneous launch of education initiatives and enforcement actions in 49 countries on six continents. In Africa, South Africa and Nigeria are the two countries seeing the launch of the initiative.

Developing countries to participate in ICT standards process
[Proffesor Ndawonde] JOHANNESURG: Leading stakeholders in the information communication technology (ICT) industry are to work together to minimise the standardisation gap between developed and developing countries through the Bridging the Standardisation Gap Fund.

Kenya's ICT sector gets $144 million credit facility
Kenya has received $144.4 million in credit from the International Development Association for the Transparency and Communications Infrastructure Project (TCIP).

Will Algeria lose the multimedia combat?
The new multimedia tools (blogs, Facebook, Dailymotion...) don't seem to have posed much of a threat to traditional media in Algeria.

Energy efficient journalists make eta finals
Two staff members of 25^° in Africa, Africa's independent energy publication, were recently nominated as finalists in the 2008 eta Awards, which promote the more efficient use of energy and aim to improve business competitiveness. Editor Marlene Raubenheimer and journalist Jody Boshoff both received news of making it to the final round in the Women in Industry category.

AFRICA

K24 and Royal Media Services join A24 Media
NAIROBI: A24 Media, the African online content delivery site has added K24 and Royal Media Services, two Kenyan broadcasters, to its list. K24, a 24-hour TV news channel which features local eyewitness reports, and Royal Media Services, a media empire with outreach across Kenya have joined A24 Media to broaden the broadcasters local content.

AFRICA

Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2008: close-up on Africa
Some African leaders have understood the advantages their countries could derive from press freedom. Others have behaved like despots again this year. The continent's best-placed countries continue by and large to be the same, with Namibia (23rd), Mali (31st), Cape Verde (36th), South Africa (38th) and Mauritius (47th) coming in the top 50 of the annual Worldwide Press Freedom Index 2008.

Opera Mini gains fans in Africa
Usage of Opera Software's mobile-phone web browser, Opera Mini, is picking up quickly in Africa, having increased by 180% from January to September of this year.

Kenyan mobile phone operators sell value added services
Some few weeks ago, Jinny Software, a new premium service rate provider started conducting interviews in Nairobi as it prepared to set up shop in Kenya.

SOUTH AFRICA

Exponential growth for African mobile web - report
Use of the mobile web has surged exponentially in Africa, according to the latest State of the Mobile Web report from Opera Software, developers of cross-platform web browsers Opera and Opera Mini. As of September 2008, Egypt has preempted Germany as the world's 10th largest user of the Opera Mini browser for mobile phones. South Africa remains firmly among the top 10 international users, currently ranked sixth.

Don't overlook print in multimedia development
AMSTERDAM: When newspaper executives talk about multimedia development, they often mean digital development. But that approach overlooks their biggest asset ­ their newspaper in print, which brings great value to multimedia delivery. That was a key message from the World Digital Publishing and the World Readership conferences recently concluded in Amsterdam.

eMarketing textbook finds its way to Kenya! - Quirk eMarketing
Tourism and online marketing have always been a likely couple. With the 2010 Soccer World Cup happening in South Africa, the need for local tourism agencies and service providers to catch up with eMarketing trends has increased evermore.

MOZAMBIQUE

Mozambique short film wins at AiM
The inaugural Africa in Motion (AiM) film festival, the shortlist of which consisted of eight short films by young and emerging African filmmakers, has been won by Rogério Manjate from Mozambique for his short film "I Love You" (2007).

Winning entries require skills to prepare - Quo Vadis Communications
South Africa has a wealth of talent and the projects that communicators throughout the country implement have been proven to be on par with the rest of the world. This can be seen through the numerous awards won by many South African business communicators down the years - notable amongst them winners of International Gold Quill Awards.

AFRICA

The rush to the cities... Africa at a glance
This report, published by courtesy of UN-HABITAT, summarises the influx of rural dwellers into the cities of Africa. The influx promises dramatic urban growth that will not only present challenges, but also opportunities for business.

Climate change may drown some of Africa's cities
People in Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, prefer to commute in three-wheeled autorickshaws, taxis and buses that run on compressed natural gas (CNG), in their bid to slow down global warming. Nineteen African port cities could be in danger - ranging from Tunis and Alexandria in the north, to Cape Town and Durban in the south.

SOUTH AFRICA

Economies under siege
Europe, one area of focus of this report, is a major trading partner with South Africa and the rest of Africa. This is the World Economic Forum's latest report focuses on how financial turmoil will affect the real economy.

RTGs: Wise technology put to wrong use in Zimbabwe
The introduction of the Real Time Gross Settlement System (RTGS) a few years ago further enhanced the country's reputation for having one of the most advanced banking systems on the African continent, but there is now a serious rethink on whether such an advanced payments system is good for Zimbabwe, a nation battling its worst economic crisis in history.

Zambia: Powering up, at last
The Zambian government signed a US$75 million financing agreement with the World Bank this week to provide electricity services to 65,000 new customers, in a country where power cuts have become the norm.

Time frame set for establishing Africa's biggest free market
This week's Tripartite Summit held in Uganda agreed on a Council of Ministers to be convened within twelve months to determine the time frame for the establishment of a single Free Trade Area (FTA) comprising the three regional economic communities (RECs), writes Bathandwa Mbola.

Zimbabwe: Military seed merchants
The distribution of agricultural inputs such as maize seed and fertilizer for the 2008/09 season has become the domain of Zimbabwe's military and President Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party.

AFRICA

African countries form single market
[Bathandwa Mbola] KAMPALA, UGANDA: Leaders of the Tripartite Summit from 26 African countries belonging to the three regional economic blocs in East and Southern Africa on Wednesday, 22 October, resolved to merge the blocs into a single regional market.

Bankers dominate Nigeria BusinessWorld 100
United Bank for Africa has emerged Nigeria's largest company with an asset base of N1191.04 billion. To arrive at the results, the companies quoted on the Nigerian Stock Exchange were assessed and ranked based on their assets, shareholders' funds, gross income, profit, employee population and market value, using their 2007 financial reports.

Equatorial Guinea: Oil money draws sub-Saharan Africans
MALABO: A few years after the first US oil drillers arrived in Equatorial Guinea in 1992, hundreds of mostly West African migrants without travel or work papers followed. National police forces now estimate that one-third of the population - more than 300,000 - is from outside the country, with most migrants arriving illegally in search of much-hyped oil money.

SOUTH AFRICA

Companies struggling to attract, serve Millennials
Most companies are struggling with how to adapt their businesses to serve a new wave of consumers from the Millennial Generation (Generation Y). This is according to a new global survey by the Economist Intelligence Unit and Genesys, an Alcatel-Lucent company.