Political Will is Weak to Make Travel in Africa Cheaper and Easier – Africa Business RoundUp

Rebound in tourism helps Kenyan economy grow faster in Q2

Kenya’s economy grew faster in the second quarter of this year compared with the same period in 2015, lifted by expansion in agriculture and a strong recovery in tourism, the statistics office said on Friday.

The Kenya National Bureau of Statistics (KNBS) said the economy expanded by 6.2 percent year-on-year in the second quarter compared with 5.9 percent in the same period in 2015.

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Political will is weak to make travel in Africa cheaper and easier

ALIKO Dangote, Africa’s richest man, is fond of banging the visa drum. He uses many public platforms to urge leaders to make it easier for Africans to travel around their own continent.

Dangote, in a television interview in Nigeria with CNBC, said he needed 38 visas to travel across Africa. And it was not always straightforward to get them, he said.

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Tapping Africa’s Full Potential

California’s Silicon Valley is nearly 10,000 miles from Kenya’s Silicon Savannah but they share a role as innovation hubs for their respective countries. Just as Silicon Valley has transformed business in the United States, Silicon Savannah entrepreneurs are now helping Kenya leapfrog development challenges and plug into the twenty-first-century global economy.

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Counting Africa’s Invisible Workers

In 46 of 54 African countries, official tracking of vital statistics such as birth, marriage, and death is limited. As the Mo Ibrahim Foundation reports, only “a third of all Africans live in a country where a census has been conducted since 2010,” and the census programs that do exist are often underfunded and unreliable. More than half of all Africans live in countries that have not conducted a labor-force survey in at least a decade.

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International Court Takes a Stand With Ruling on Destruction of Antiquities

The International Criminal Court in The Hague, in ruling that the destruction of cultural antiquities is a war crime, sent a signal, even if further prosecutions appear unlikely for the time being.

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