East African Business Notifier

Ugandan companies registered a further expansion in business activity midway through the third quarter, extending the current sequence of growth to seven months as the headline Stanbic Bank Purchasing Managers' Index (PMI) remained above the positive threshold mark of 50.0 .  At 53.3 during August, the Stanbic Bank PMI was down slightly from 53.6 in July, but maintained a trend of improving private sector conditions on a monthly basis since February.   Christopher Legilisho, Economist at Stanbic Bank  said, "The Stanbic Bank Uganda PMI showed ongoing strong economic conditions in the private sector in August. Sustained new order and output growth imply business conditions were supportive across all sectors. Furthermore, quantities of inputs purchased increased, and inventories grew. Meanwhile, companies were still optimistic about future output.” He said, “Employment conditions were robust in August, except for manufacturing where staffing numbers were unchanged on the mo...

  Airtel Uganda’s latest financial results paint a clear picture, Ugandans are choosing data over voice calls, and the shift is transforming the telecom industry. In its half-year results for the period ending June 30, 2025, Airtel reported a 30.4% jump in data revenue to Ushs 525.7 billion, making up nearly half of all service revenues. Just a few years ago, voice calls were the telco cash cow. Today, they’ve taken a back seat to data bundles. This change is showing up not just in the number of new customers but also in how much data existing users are consuming. Airtel’s data subscribers grew by 25.9% to 7.5 million, while average usage per user climbed 22.6% to nearly 6GB per month. And the network is feeling the heat. Overall traffic surged 57.4%, forcing Airtel to accelerate its infrastructure rollout. Over the past six months, the company has added 176 new 4G sites, rolled out 1,793km of fibre, and installed 150 additional 5G sites to keep pace with demand. One striking metri...

Kaushik Basu ITHACA, NEW YORK – In a 2022 paper, I introduced an allegory I called the  Incarceration Game  – an academic exercise that explores how authoritarian leaders, when their popularity falters, consolidate power through increasingly oppressive tactics. My analysis drew inspiration from a 1948 paper on the so-called “ surprise test paradox ,” which showed how rational expectations can unravel under certain conditions. US President Donald Trump, grappling with waning public support, seems determined to follow this authoritarian playbook. The most striking example is the administration’s attempt to bring mortgage fraud charges against prominent critics – most notably Federal Reserve Board of Governors member  Lisa Cook , Democratic US Senator Adam Schiff, and New York Attorney General Letitia James. At the  center of these efforts  is Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte, a major Trump donor who now oversees the US mortgage industry. Naturall...

  T he water cycle has become increasingly erratic and extreme, swinging between deluge and drought, according to a new report from the World Meteorological Organization (WMO). It highlights the cascading impacts of too much or too little water on economies and society.   The  State of Global Water Resources report  says only about one-third of the global river basins had “normal” conditions in 2024. The rest were either above or below normal – the sixth consecutive year of clear imbalance.   2024 was the third straight year with widespread glacier loss across all regions. Many small-glacier regions have already reached or are about to passthe so-called peak water point - when a glacier's melting reaches its maximum annual runoff, after which this decreases due to glacier shrinkage.   The Amazon Basin and other parts of South America, as well as southern Africa were gripped by severe drought in 2024, whilst there were wetter-than-normal conditions in centra...

Gwen Mwaba CAIRO – There is no silver bullet for expanding trade and commerce in Africa – or anywhere else, for that matter. But we can say with certainty that trade finance forms the backbone of sustainable growth and economic revitalization on the continent.  It is critical for promoting the integration of African economies and drawing a line under postcolonial fragmentation, which is essential for enabling small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) to grow and diversify. By strengthening their ability to export, import, and invest with confidence, African countries can unlock their vast potential and bolster their resilience in an increasingly uncertain world.  The continent’s leaders have already taken steps toward achieving these goals. By the end of 2023, intra-African trade reached  $192.2 billion , up from $186.3 billion the previous year, partly owing to an increase in trade finance. That number is expected to rise with the continued implementation of the African C...

Mohamed Adow NAIROBI – When delegates from around the world convened in Bonn, Germany, last month for the 62nd session of the United Nations Climate Change Subsidiary Bodies (SB62), the specter of sovereign debt loomed large.  For African countries, in particular, debt is no longer a problem unfolding in parallel with escalating climate shocks and widening development deficits, but rather the key obstacle to effective crisis responses. Debt reform and climate finance are two sides of the same coin. According to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, African countries owe  $655 billion  in external debt, and debt-service payments have more than doubled since 2010, driven by rising interest rates and currency depreciation.  This year, the continent’s collective debt-service bill will amount to a whopping  $79 billion . In 2023, 34 African countries  spent more  on debt service than on health or education, let alone disaster relief or green infra...

Jayati Ghosh NEW DELHI – The world’s largest corporations now rival most governments – not only in terms of revenue and assets, but also in their ability to shape political outcomes. Their power is reinforced by the immense personal fortunes of billionaires, which enable them to wield disproportionate influence over public policies, laws, and regulations. Crucially, extreme concentrations of wealth and power could not have developed without the active support of policymakers, whether tacit or explicit. And because governments themselves create the legal, regulatory, and political environments in which these fortunes are built, they retain the authority to restrain, regulate, or even expropriate private wealth. The fact that they rarely do so does not reflect a lack of capacity, but a deliberate political choice. Consequently, being an oligarch is inherently precarious. Crony capitalism may grant enormous advantages, but it also carries built-in risks. Chief among them is political chan...

In response to the upcoming 2025   G eneral   E lections   in Malawi , the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), in partnership with the African Union (AU),   launched a Pre-election Initiative in Lilongwe aimed at fostering dialogue, consensus-building and preventive diplomacy to ensure peaceful and credible elections in Malawi. Key Components of the Pre-elections Initiative which will ran from August to December 2025 will include High-Level deployment of Eminent Persons from the AU and COMESA  to engage with key electoral stakeholders including senior government officials, political leaders, judiciary, electoral authorities, security agencies, civil society, media, traditional leaders, youth, women, and the private sector. This COMESA-AU initiative will be led by H.E Lady Justice (retired) Effie Owuor – a member of the African Union’s Panel of the Wise and H. E Ambassador Rashed Gamaal Ashraf, the Chair of the COMESA Commi...

Antara Haldar NEW DELHI – The 78th anniversary of India’s independence this month offers an opportunity to recall one of the most insidious moments in the country’s post-independence history: Prime Minister Indira Gandhi’s 1975 decision to declare an emergency and suspend civil liberties. A new book by political scientist Srinath Raghavan,  Indira Gandhi and the Years That Transformed India , not only revisits that fateful move, but also traces its lasting impact half a century later. Raghavan’s unsentimental autopsy of India in the 1970s – one of the country’s most turbulent decades – is a timely study of how political power can be used to bend the scaffolding of democracy. He sets out to offer “an antidote to every generation’s illusion that its own problems are uniquely oppressive,” but the book’s themes resonate in ways that even the author may not have fully anticipated. Gandhi, the daughter of India’s first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, is often depicted as either a cynic...

Rakesh Mohan, Janak Raj NEW DELHI – India finds itself at a critical juncture: it must accelerate economic growth while meeting its climate commitments. Estimates of the country’s climate-financing needs have  ranged  from $160 billion to $288 billion annually through 2030, but these top-down figures rely on broad assumptions and often fail to reflect sector-specific realities. In a  recent study , we take a different approach, using a bottom-up methodology to provide a more accurate estimate of India’s climate-finance requirements. We focus on four of the country’s highest-emitting sectors: power, steel, cement, and road transport. Importantly, our study measures only the additional capital expenditure required to fund climate mitigation, over and above the investments already expected under a business-as-usual scenario. We estimate that these four sectors will require a total of $467 billion in climate finance by 2030, averaging $54 billion annually, or roughly 1.3% of ...