🔅 Veuve Clicquot's African Expansion & The Innovative Project Keeps Culture Alive
Plus, Brain Drain 2.0. & Tinubu Takes Action
Photo of the day: Namibia
Markets:
🟢 Nigerian SE: 65,268.28 (+0.41%)
🔴 Johannesburg SE: 76,826.63 (-0.13%)
— Ghana SE: 2,870.72 (0.00%)
🔴 Nairobi SE: 110.27 (-0.34%)
🟢 US S&P 500: 4,555.66 (+0.43%)
🔴 Shanghai Composite: 3,164.16 (-0.11%)
*Data accurate as of the close of markets across the continent
Brief & Bright: Africa's Top Five Highlights
🍾 Veuve Clicquot Toasts Africa | Ready for a bottle of bubbly? Veuve Clicquot is ready to pop the cork and start pouring in Africa. The champagne maker, which is owned by the luxury-goods powerhouse LVMH, is planning to expand in East Africa and Ghana as demand for premium products rises on the continent. The company already sells its products in South Africa, Nigeria, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria, and now they’re looking to make a bigger splash.
🇲🇱 The ADLaM Project: Making Language Preservation Cool Again | The Barry brothers, Ibrahima and Abdoulaye, have just made language preservation cool again. The two brothers created an alphabet for the Fulani people, the world’s largest nomadic group, whose native language had been slipping away from them for centuries. But, with help from Microsoft and creative agency McCann NY, the brothers developed a digital version of their alphabet, ADLaM, which is now available across Microsoft 365’s suite of programs, desktop, and mobile. The digital alphabet is preserving Fulani culture while helping to combat illiteracy in West Africa. The brothers and their collaborators also created educational resources, including a children’s book and in-classroom learning materials, to teach the ADLaM alphabet and aspects of the Fulani culture. Guinea’s Minister of Education has recognized ADLaM as Pulaar’s official alphabet, and the Mali government is in the process of doing the same.
🇳🇬 Tinubu Takes Action: Nigeria’s President Promises Economic Relief | Nigeria’s President Bola Tinubu has taken action to ease the financial strain felt by Nigerians after the scrapping of a popular but expensive petrol subsidy. The President announced the creation of a new Infrastructure Support Fund (ISF) on Friday to revamp transportation and provide funding for health, education, power, and water projects. To add to that, Tinubu is also rolling out a program to distribute free grains and subsidized fertilizer, and freezing $997.47 million of 1.9 trillion naira of federal revenue that had been due to be shared among its three tiers of government. While this is good news, some labour unions have criticized the government for ending the fuel subsidy without any measures to mitigate rising prices.
🌍 Brain Drain 2.0: Will Easier Immigration Mean Fewer African Tech Talent? | Germany and Canada have made it easier for tech workers to move there from abroad, and some African tech experts are worried that it’ll mean a new wave of brain drain. People like Nigerian front-end developer Edmund Ekott, who went through an exasperating immigration process when he moved to Germany in 2022, may benefit from the new laws. But Africa’s tech industry is at risk of losing its best and brightest to countries like the UK, where work visas for Nigerians have risen by 303% since December 2019. Rebecca Enonchong, founder of enterprise software company AppsTech, tweeted that the new immigration initiatives will “decimate our local tech talent pools” if governments don’t take action. As if the tech industry wasn’t already competitive enough, it looks like things are about to get even more cutthroat.
🇸🇳 Senegal's Migrant Crisis: 17 Bodies Washed Up on Dakar Shore | In a tragedy that’s becoming all too common, 17 bodies washed up on the shore of Dakar’s Ouakam neighbourhood early Monday morning. It’s believed that the deceased were migrants who had boarded an overloaded wooden boat (known as a pirogue) in search of a better life in the Canary Islands. It’s estimated that 800 people have died or gone missing on the Atlantic migration route in the first half of this year alone. The uptick in sea-bound migration is likely due to a number of factors, such as ailing economies, a lack of jobs, political unrest, and the effects of climate change. It’s not only a Senegalese issue, either—people are risking their lives to get to the Canaries from Morocco, Western Sahara, and Mauritania.
Food for Thought
“"When the shepherd comes home in peace, the milk is sweet."”
— Ethiopian Proverb.
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