South African banks head our league table again, with the top five slots and a hefty chunk of Tier 1 capital.

IMF prescriptions have been discarded, making way for an African-owned plan, based on good governance, infrastructure investment and intra-regional trade. James Eedes explains.

Two South African firms have launched successful high-yield debt issues. Edward Russell-Walling reports.
When South African corporates want to raise capital, the international bond market is not the first place they go looking. For most of them, it would quite literally be the last. But two groundbreaking South African high-yield issues may herald a change in attitude.

Algeria is working hard to recover from years of civil war. Its twin aims of social reconciliation and fiscal reform include restructure of the financial services sector. James Eedes reports on progress.

Nigeria’s central bank governor Charles Soludo is pushing through reforms designed to strengthen the banking sector and is seeing results. James Eedes reports.

Innovative schemes are overturning the belief that financing African small and medium-sized enterprises is unprofitable. There may even be models for commercial banks to follow. But development finance is still needed to prove the case,James Eedes reports.

Should banks review their strategies for lending to poor customers? South Africa’s African Bank, a specialist lender to the country’s low-income, under-banked population, produced a 17.9% pre-tax return on assets in the year ending September 30, 2004.

While some believe the G8 summit in Scotland was a missed opportunity,James Eedes reports that solutions originating in Africa promise to have themost lasting and meaningful impact.

Much is expected of Egypt’s financial sector reforms and now is the time for the government to deliver, writes Jon Marks in Cairo.

In Africa, the poor are proving to be reliable, stable customers who make microfinance institutions twice as profitable as commercial operations, write Elizabeth Littlefield and Martin Holtmann.