Forbes Africa December 2021 - January 2022

THE LAST TWO YEARS WERE AKIN TO BEING enrolled into a master’s program, unlearning and learning together with our human cohorts in a new global Covid-19-induced university featuring unwieldy textbooks and sleepless, bleary-eyed nights. Some of the new subjects on the program? Agility, adaptability and empathy, and new, humane ways to communicate to a workforce post layoffs and lockdowns, even as the office of the future was being constructed. As one of the entrepreneurs in this edition says about the new mantra for his business: “Our mission is to keep commerce human.” It’s a brave new world that we have entered and 2022 will cap a period in history that came without a textbook preamble. It’s almost like we developed a new muscle or new neuron pathways to comprehend the…

AFTER ALMOST 19 months, I was finally able to return to our home in Johannesburg. It seemed like eternity that we were away but something about reaching South Africa fills our family with warmth, which is no different from when we reach home in Dubai or Delhi. Johannesburg has been home for 17 years almost to the month. As we disembarked from the plane, we found the travelator at the airport was not working – the most likely culprit the power outages one is now increasingly accustomed to in South Africa. There was a lady walking with us and in typical South African style, she said: “Eish, it’s great to be back home, nothing has changed.” My wife and I looked at each other and had tears in our eyes…

STREAMING GIANT NETFLIX WILL keep its date with the holidays with a much-anticipated Season 2 sequel to the original hit African series, How To Ruin Christmas. Reprising her role as Beauty Sello is South African actor and radio DJ, Thando Thabethe (pictured), who was also FORBES AFRICA’s 30 Under 30 list-maker in 2019. This year too, the series comes with its share of high jinks but also with a funeral thrown in for good measure. In an interview with FORBES AFRICA, Thabethe reveals more about the plot, and how it will be different from the first series, which centered around a wedding. “There’s a lot of difference but there’s also a lot of the same, I mean, it’s still How To Ruin Christmas. So still a lot of drama with…

Guinea Forbesreported in September that the special forces unit of the Guinea Armed Forces detained the country’s long-serving President Alpha Conde “in an apparent coup”. Unrest in the world’s third-largest producer of bauxite pushed aluminum prices to the highest level in over a decade. Prices of the metal in the London Metal Exchange climbed 1.8% to $2,775.50 per ton — the highest it has been since May 2011. In China, the aluminum futures jumped up nearly 3.5% to around $3,400 (CNY 21,970) — the highest it has been since 2006 — before leveling off at around 2.3%. South Africa #Elections2021 At the beginning of November, millions of South Africans took to their nearest polling stations to cast their votes for the local government elections. Although 26.2 million people had registered…

SOUTH AFRICAN RESEARCHERS ARE NOW developing an innovative, validated online tool to help people recognize and seek treatment for depression and mental health issues. PhD candidate Tasneem Hassem of the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, along with co-founder Professor Sumaya Laher, have been awarded almost $7,000 in seed funding to further develop and commercialize the tool, aimed at allowing users to more easily recognize and obtain treatment for depression, particularly within the South African context, where low mental health awareness and access to mental health services can still be a challenge. “Unfortunately, low awareness of the symptoms of depression means that many people do not know when they are depressed. During our research and through interviews with stakeholders, we determined that an online screening tool would help raise awareness…

“We have not seen progress in Africa against malaria with 260,000 children still dying every year.” NO ONE COULD HAVE PREDICTED THAT THE last 18 months would have been defined by a virus that caused the world to quite literally shut down. As the infection rate rose by the hour, talk turned to vaccines and scientists raced to create an agent that would provide the global population with a chance of survival. With the number of fatalities increasing, it seemed as though the immunity-boosting serum could not come quick enough. It took less than a year for the Covid-19 vaccine to be developed, with more than half of the world’s citizens having already received at least one dose. Now, a completely different vaccine, which has taken almost three decades to…