Thursday March 22, 2012

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I’m Shannon de Ryhove

Making headlines:

Opportunities for private equity (PE) investments beyond South Africa’s borders were starting to attract more interest from investors, Ernst & Young’s ‘Global private equity watch – a return to entrepreneurship 2012’ report said. South Africa remained the sub-Saharan Africa region’s largest PE market, having attracted the most PE investment over the last two years. Gross domestic product (GDP) growth across Africa was expected to average 5% over the next ten years, with Ghana, Ethiopia and Uganda expected to exceed 7% GDP growth a year. But with PE penetration in the sub-Saharan region low at 0.11%, there was less competition for deals and investment opportunity.

Nigerian Finance Minister Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala and former Colombian Finance Minister Jose Antonio Ocampo are set to be nominated to lead the World Bank, sources with knowledge of emerging market efforts to find candidates said. The candidacies of Okonjo-Iweala and Ocampo, who have credentials as both economists and diplomats and, according to sources, the respective backing of Brazil and South Africa, pose a challenge to the US, whose hold on the top post has never been contested. But with its majority of votes and the expected support of European countries, the US is still likely to ensure that another American will succeed Robert Zoellick, who plans to step down when his term expires at the end of June.

Empowering female farmers in developing countries is crucial to solving the world's food problems as an era of food price spikes looms, the chair of a panel which advises governments and donors on agricultural development in sub-Saharan Africa says. "If we're going to feed the world and, in particular, if Africa is going to be fed, we need every tool we can lay our hands on to make that happen and one component of that is to ensure that women fulfil their potential as farmers," Gordon Conway, chair of the Montpellier Panel, said as the group launched a report on African agriculture. "Women are constrained by the fact that they don't have enough access to productive resources and they don't have enough access to assets and if they did they could increase yields on farms by 20% to 30%, which would have a really big impact," he said.

Also making headlines:

There is sufficient dilution capacity to ameliorate the untreated acid mine drainage (AMD) and neutralised AMD decanting from basins in the Witwatersrand between now and the end of 2014, Water and Environmental Affairs Minister Edna Molewa said.

And, Guinea Bissau's former prime minister Carlos Gomes Junior scored 49% in a presidential election, poll authorities said, well ahead of his main rival but just short of the absolute majority needed to avoid a second round.

That’s a roundup of news making headlines today.