Africa

It is ten years since Business Excellence first visited Ambatovy Joint Venture Project in Madagascar. At that time, the mine was still at the preparatory phase, albeit with serious ambition. With total funding for the project crossing the $5.5 billion threshold, it was, and remains to this day, the largest investment in Madagascar’s history, and has contributed nearly a quarter of the country’s tax revenues since it become operational.

Located 355 kilometres east of Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, the Boungou mine is the fifth largest mine in the West African country, which is making a name for itself as a serious player in the global gold market. Gold production in Burkina Faso has been on a fast upward trend over the past decade, growing from 22 million ounces in 2010 to 58 million ounces in 2020. At the time of writing, production growth shows no sign of stopping.

Gold mining in Tanzania goes back to the end of the 19th century, when gold mines were discovered close to Lake Victoria. After several more finds over the course of the 20th century, a culture of gold mining took hold in the country. When the mines were privatized at the end of the 1980s, it opened the door to many of the world’s most highly-regarded mineral mining companies arrived in Tanzania.

Sustainability is becoming an increasingly important issue in the mining sector across Africa, and Namibia is no exception. As a country with a rich history of mining and blessed with multiple extractive assets, it is important for mining operations to consider the long-term impact of their activities on the environment and local communities.

The Kibali goldmine in the Haut-Uélé province of the northeast Democratic Republic of Congo is no ordinary mine. With 812,152 ounces produced in 2021, the combined open pit and underground gold mine is officially the sixth biggest in the world. Now into its 13th year, the gold mine is still considered to have an enormous upside: In addition to an exploration prospect pipeline that continues to expand, its business plan seems set to continue for at least another 10 years. Business Excellence decided to take a closer look.
 

In 2023, Eswatini Electricity Company (EEC) marks sixty years of existence. At the time of its foundation in 1963, Swaziland - as Eswatini was then known - had electricity, but not much to speak of. Even by the year 2000, a full fifty years after the first electric generators were installed in Mbabane, only about 20% of the population of slightly over one million people had access to electricity.

Despite its 4,000-year-old history, Egypt’s capital Cairo is a city that refuses to spend too long looking in the rearview mirror. With its greater metropolitan now home to 20 million people - making Cairo one of the world’s megacities - the city and its people continue to look to the future. A good example of this is the city’s metro system, Africa’s first urban railway, the first of three full-fledged metro systems built in Africa, as well as the first in the Arab world.