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CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele: Why Nigeria’s Central Bank retained MPR at 13.5%

ABUJA (Reuters) &#8211; Nigeria and German company Siemens have agreed a roadmap to increase Nigeria’s “reliable” power supply to 11,000 megawatts by 2023, President Muhammadu Buhari said on Monday.



The president of the West African country said that at present, “only an average of 4,000 megawatts reliably reaches consumers”. He said Nigeria would work with Siemens to achieve “7,000 megawatts of reliable power supply by 2021 and 11,000 megawatts by 2023”.



Reporting by Felix Onuah; writing by Alexis Akwagyiram; editing by Jason Neely

What you need to  know about Nigeria’s roadmap agreement with Siemens to increase power

By <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/anmar-frangoul-profile--cnbc/">Anmar Frangoul</a> 



Africa’s largest wind farm, the Lake Turkana Wind Power project, has been officially inaugurated.



The 310-megawatt (MW) facility was opened by President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya on Friday.



“We are pleased to note that Kenya is without doubt on course to be a global leader in renewable energy,” he said in a speech given at the launch.



“This will not only ensure that our nation’s scenic beauty and unique ecosystems are preserved and protected for both present and future generations, but will also ensure that we become energy independent and that our energy supply will be safe as well as predictable,” he added.&nbsp; The Lake Turkana Wind Power project is made up of 365 turbines, each having a capacity of 850 kilowatts. It is located 600 kilometers from Nairobi in the Loiyangalani District, Marsabit County. Construction of the facility started in October 2014 and it began full commercial operations in March 2019.&nbsp; The International Renewable Energy Agency has described Africa as being “rich in renewable energy sources” such as hydro, wind and the sun.&nbsp; The Lake Turkana project is one of several large-scale renewable energy schemes to be developed on the continent in recent years.&nbsp; In December 2018, it was announced that ground had been broken on West Africa’s “first utility-scale wind power project,” located in Senegal.



The 158.7 MW Parc Eolien Taiba N’Diaye, or PETN, is set to be completed in 2020, according to renewable energy firm Lekela.



The 46-turbine facility will use turbines from Danish company Vestas and will generate more than 450,000 megawatt hours of energy annually, boosting Senegal’s generation capacity by approximately 15 percent, Lakela said.



This article first appeared on CNBC <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/22/the-biggest-wind-farm-in-africa-is-officially-up-and-running.html">https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/22/the-biggest-wind-farm-in-africa-is-officially-up-and-running.html</a> and is republished with its permission.

The biggest wind farm in Africa is officially up and running in this East African nation

GENEVA (Reuters) &#8211; A Congolese woman who may have spread the deadly Ebola virus in Uganda did not go to Rwanda or the Congolese city of Goma while contagious, the World Health Organization said on Friday.



On Thursday, a report written by Uganda’s Health Ministry and published by the WHO’s Africa office had said the woman, a fishmonger, was suspected of going to Goma and Rwanda as well as Uganda before she died.



That raised fears of the outbreak spreading in Rwanda, which has never had a recorded case of Ebola.



But the WHO later withdrew the report and shut down the website where the daily updates were being posted, saying some of the information had not been verified. [nL8N24J2MF]



“We have investigated fully, and there was no travel to anywhere but Uganda,” WHO spokeswoman Margaret Harris said, adding that inaccurate conjecture had unfortunately found its way into the reports.



Healthworkers have mounted a massive campaign of vigilance and vaccination on key routes and borders in the region, and have screened almost 75 million people since the outbreak was declared 11 months ago. It has killed more than 1,700 people.



The 22-year-old woman was thought to have crossed the border between Uganda and Congo at an unmonitored crossing point, the deleted reports said. Harris said there no chance she had also slipped into Rwanda without being spotted.



“We are absolutely certain,” she said. “Our team&#8230; went across and talked to everybody and tracked it day-by-day. Now in her life she may have gone to Rwanda&#8230; but the important thing is she did not spend any time in Rwanda while symptomatic.”



It was extraordinary that a woman with end-stage Ebola had managed to cross the border and sell fish for a day, she added.



A lot of people at potential risk were now being followed up and people were being vaccinated on both sides of the border, Harris said. But it would take several days before it became clear if the woman, who vomited several times at a market, had infected anyone.



Other details in the withdrawn reports were also unverified, including information about a second Congolese Ebola patient travelling to the same market, and about a group of Ugandan healthworkers who may have been exposed to Ebola.



Reporting by Tom Miles; Editing by Mark Heinrich

WHO says investigators conclude that Congolese woman who may have spread the Ebola virus in Uganda did not enter Rwanda

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By <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/arjun-kharpal/">Arjun Kharpal</a>



<a class="" href="https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=GOOGL">Google</a> and its operations in <a class="" href="https://www.cnbc.com/china/">China</a> have come under the spotlight in the past few days.



Billionaire investor Peter Thiel this week accused the U.S. technology giant of&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/15/peter-thiel-reportedly-says-the-fbi-and-cia-should-investigate-google.html" class="">working with the Chinese military</a>&nbsp;and called for the U.S. government to investigate Google. In response,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/donald-trump/" class="">President Donald Trump</a>&nbsp;said his administration&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/trump-administration-will-take-a-look-into-peter-thiels-claims-of-google-working-with-china.html" class="">will “take a look” into Google</a>.



The tech giant has denied working with the Chinese military.



Still, the controversy has sparked interest in what Google is doing in China. CNBC took a closer look at Google’s business dealings in China.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">‘Project Dragonfly’</h2>



Google ended its search product in China in 2010 and is effectively blocked in the country. However, a report emerged last year that the search giant was looking to launch a censored version of its search app in China. The initiative,&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2018/10/16/google-ceo-sundar-pichai-discusses-censored-search-app-in-china.html" class="">which the company acknowledged publicly</a>, was in its early stages. In China, all internet services are required to censor information which the government deems sensitive.



However, Vice President for Government Affairs and Public Policy at the company, Karan Bhatia, said this week that&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/16/ted-cruz-confronts-google-with-internal-presentation-on-censorship.html" class="">Google had abandoned plans</a>&nbsp;for “Project Dragonfly,” the name of its China search product initiative.



So right now, Google is still blocked in China and can only be accessed via a virtual private network (VPN), which helps mask a user’s internet location.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">A.I. research</h2>



One of Thiel’s accusations is that Chinese spies have infiltrated Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) projects, but he did not provide any evidence.



Google does have AI projects in China though. In 2017, the company opened up an&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2017/12/13/alphabets-google-opens-china-ai-centre.html" class="">AI research center in China</a>.



On its website, Google says AI research in China is focused on education and so-called natural language understanding — which refers to an AI technique focused on getting machines to understand human language. Google is looking to apply AI to auctioning so that the bidding process for ads can be more efficient. This could be important for Google, which operates an advertising marketplace.



In China, the work is also contributing to AI products that Google makes available globally, such as TensorFlow. This is an open source library that can help other companies develop AI products.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Cloud computing</h2>



Technology giants such as&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=BABA" class="">Alibaba</a>&nbsp;and&nbsp;<a href="https://www.cnbc.com/quotes/?symbol=700-HK" class="">Tencent</a>&nbsp;dominate the cloud market in China. So Google’s tactic is to try to sell its cloud products to Chinese firms that have international operations in Southeast Asia and elsewhere.



A search of Google job postings in China showed the company is looking for cloud computing engineers, data managers, sales and business development roles across Beijing, Shanghai and Shenzhen.



The company is also hiring people to target customers in specific industries — from media and entertainment to manufacturing.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Hardware</h2>



Google sells a number of hardware products including smartphones, smart speakers and thermostats, under the Nest brand that it owns. Some of that is manufactured in China.



The company is currently advertising roles for engineers to test products and for manufacturing and supply chain managers. On LinkedIn, a number of Google employees in Shenzhen, a key technology hub in China, listed their jobs as hardware-related.



However, Bloomberg reported in June that Google was moving the production of some Nest thermostats and server hardware out of China to avoid tariffs from the U.S.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">App developers and the Google Play Store</h2>



The Google Play Store, the company’s app store, is blocked in China. So Google is trying to work with app developers in China to help them bring their products onto the Play Store in international markets.



Under its job listings, Google advertised for two roles for a business development manager related to the play store.



“As a Business Development Manager of Google Play, you will empower developers to build successful businesses on Play/Android globally, and inspire the ecosystem to innovate on/invest in Android and Play,” the job description reads.



Google also has individual roles for the gaming section of the Google Play store. Games are a huge part of its app store.



<h2 class="wp-block-heading">Advertising</h2>



Advertising is a core part of Google’s revenue but because its services are blocked in China, it can’t really sell ads on those platforms there. So the company focuses on Chinese businesses looking to advertise on Google platforms abroad, whether that is on its search engine, YouTube or something else.



One job that’s being advertised is for a business development consultant in Shanghai who will be “responsible for driving business growth and attracting new medium to large size advertisers for Google.” There are also people focused on getting advertisers from specific industries like retail or entertainment.



Overall, Google’s business in China is mostly aimed at getting Chinese companies to use its products outside of China.



This article first appeared on CNBC <a href="https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/google-china-what-businesses-the-search-giant-has-in-the-country.html">https://www.cnbc.com/2019/07/17/google-china-what-businesses-the-search-giant-has-in-the-country.html</a> and is republished with its permission.

Google has been accused of working with China. Here’s what they’ve been doing there

Understanding the African consumer

JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) &#8211; The South African unit of Ford Motor Co said on Wednesday it would hire an additional 1,200 staff at one of its local assembly plants, an increase of over 25 percent, to add an extra shift and raise production.



The additional shift, which will increase production to 720 vehicles per day, is the result of a 3 billion rand ($215 million) investment in South Africa that was announced in 2017, aimed at increasing annual production to 168,000 units.



The U.S.-owned company currently employs around 4,300 people in South Africa, at the plant in the Silverton suburb of South Africa’s administrative capital Pretoria, which will add the extra shift, and at another site in the coastal city of Port Elizabeth.



“The third shift will allow us to ramp up our production from the current 506 vehicles assembled per day to a peak of 720 units to satisfy the strong demand from customers in South Africa, as well as for our crucial exports to 148 markets around the world,” Ockert Berry, vice president of operations for Ford Middle East and Africa said in a statement.



Ford joins a number of other global carmakers in ramping up production on the continent, which promises rapid growth at the same time as trade tensions and upsets like the United Kingdom’s departure from the European Union threaten their operations elsewhere.



The South African arm of Japanese carmaker Nissan also announced a similarly sized investment earlier this year, increasing production at its local plant by 30,000 units, while BMW production chief Oliver Zipse said earlier this month that it had moved some production from the UK as a result of Brexit, and that British plants no longer built South African components.



Around a third of Ford’s local production is sold in South Africa and other sub-Saharan African countries, with the rest exported elsewhere.



The additional shift will start in August and will be focused on the New Ranger, Ranger Raptor and Everest models. The locally-built Ranger is ranked as the top-selling pick-up in Europe and leads light commercial vehicle exports.



The plant in Port Elizabeth produces 120,000 diesel engines per year for the Silverton plant, as well as 130,000 units per year for export to North America, China and Europe and 280,000 component sets per year.



($1 = 13.9720 rand)



Reporting by Emma Rumney; Editing by Elaine Hardcastle

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article

Friendship Knows No Borders: Helping Africa heal itself

CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele: Why Nigeria’s Central Bank retained MPR at 13.5%

What you need to know about Nigeria’s roadmap agreement with Siemens to increase power

The biggest wind farm in Africa is officially up and running in this East African nation

WHO says investigators conclude that Congolese woman who may have spread the Ebola virus in Uganda did not enter Rwanda

Rwanda Debate: Implementing Transformative ICT Solutions in Africa

Mandela Day Panel: City of Ekurhuleni tackles poverty and equality on #MandelaDay2019

Crypto Trader: One on one with BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes on crypto derivatives, future plans

Google has been accused of working with China. Here’s what they’ve been doing there

Understanding the African consumer

South African subsidiary of carmaker Ford plans to add 1,200 jobs

What will SARB do?

Unpacking Zuma’s third day at state capture inquiry

Day 3 highlights of Jacob Zuma’s testimony at Zondo inquiry

Tourism and hospitality industry outlook for Africa

In conversation with Teljoy’s Founder Theo Rutstein

#SAElections2019: What do the youth want?

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Advertise With Us

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