For decades, moving money across Africa’s borders has been an exercise in friction: a patchwork of currencies, correspondent banks, clearing delays and costs that fall hardest on the businesses and households that can least afford them. On Thursday, two financial players staked a claim to dismantling that friction, announcing an expanded alliance intended to reshape how value flows into, out of and across the continent. Absa Group, one of Africa’s largest diversified financial services providers,...

On the banks where the Chobe River bends toward four converging nations, a different kind of convergence is being planned. From November 11 to 13, 2026, the Cresta Mowana Boutique Resort will host a gathering of board directors, chief executives and governance professionals drawn from across the Southern African Development Community, united by an uncomfortable premise: that the institutions meant to safeguard the region’s wealth have too often become the instruments of its loss. The...

For a country whose fortunes have long risen and fallen with the price of a single, glittering commodity, the numbers that landed this quarter felt less like a statistic than a reprieve. Botswana’s economy expanded by 8.7 percent in the second quarter of 2026, its fastest pace in nearly five years, as the diamond mines that have underwritten the nation’s prosperity for half a century came back to life. The rebound, confirmed by Statistics Botswana,...

For an economy so often cast as a cautionary tale, Sub-Saharan Africa is quietly rewriting its own narrative. Even as war flickers across the Middle East, development aid recedes, and the costs of borrowing climb, the region’s economies are not merely holding their ground. They are, against the odds, picking up speed. Growth across Sub-Saharan Africa is projected to accelerate from 4.1 percent in 2025 to 4.3 percent in 2026, according to the latest Africa...

For most of modern life, the ritual of paying has demanded a familiar choreography: the reach for the wallet, the fumble for the right card, the small anxiety of discovering, mid-queue, that the wallet has been left at home. Absa Bank Botswana is betting that this choreography is coming to an end – and that the humble wristwatch, once a mere instrument of timekeeping, is poised to become one of the most intimate tools of...