Forbes Africa February - March 2022

HAVE YOU NOTICED? AS LOGOPHILES WILL TELL you, the last two years have thrown up dozens of new words that have now gained currency and earned place in the dictionaries of the world. The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) has now officially included ‘hybrid working’ as a dictionary term, along with others such as ‘anti-vaxxer’ and ‘social distance’. ‘Vax’ was the OED’s word of the year in 2021. As we move fast and furtively into year three of the pandemic, there will be more multisyllabic words that we don’t know yet, and a few proper nouns that we will continue to use as verbs, such as ‘Pfizered’, ‘Zoomed’ and ‘Netflixed’. I have also been tossing around a few lately into my work lexicon. As Covid-19 shook us out of our self-assured…

THE HIGHLIGHT OF THE HOLIDAY season was my visit to Expo 2020 Dubai. Delayed by Covid, this was one of the long overdue events on my calendar since it began in October last year. I had visited the site in 2019 with Manal Al Bayat, the Executive Vice President and one of the driving forces behind the project; she had taken my wife and me around to show us the scale of the project when it was still a large construction site. There was a date clock in the lobby of her office that was a constant reminder to the team that the deadline was rapidly approaching. True to Dubai’s vision and meticulous planning, not surprisingly, the project was not only completed well on time but launched with a lot…

WHO DOES NOT LOVE A LITTLE DRAMA? And mix that with one of the biggest reality TV franchises (The Real Housewives) in the world and the queens of the coastal city of Durban in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, and you may hit a goldmine. Just ask the star of The Real Housewives of Durban (RHOD), actress, model and businesswoman Sorisha Naidoo. In an interview with FORBES AFRICA, Naidoo speaks about the exciting new season of the series following the thumping success of the first season, which broke records on Showmax when it launched on the African streaming service in January last year. RHOD has since launched in 50 countries across Africa, as well as on Hayu in 27 territories internationally, including Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, France, Germany, the Netherlands,…

As the world moves into year three of the global Covid-19 pandemic, the work-from-home model has become the ‘new normal’. Cheapflights, a travel fare metasearch engine, has released its ‘Work From Wherever Index’ ranking 111 countries where travelers may want to combine business and leisure ('bleisure'). Mauritius, which came in at fourth place in the world ranking, tops the ranking for the Middle East and Africa. According to the report, this is “not surprising since the island nation offers great weather, low crime rates and a fairly low cost of living in addition to a free remote work visa (also called a digital nomad visa). These visas are travel authorizations for on-the-go workers and are often relatively easy to obtain. They allow travelers to work independently and remotely during their…

Through COVAX, UNICEF has delivered 1 billion Covid-19 vaccines to 144 countries, marking the billionth in Rwanda on January 15. Rwanda has had at least 13,892,895 doses of Covid vaccines distributed so far, according to Reuters, enough to vaccinate 55% of the population. In December 2021, COVAX delivered over 335 million Covid-19 vaccine doses. “While this is a great achievement on our journey to achieve Covid-19 vaccine equity across the globe and end the pandemic, we also recognize that global supply constraints and Covid-19 surges around the globe prevented COVAX from reaching the goal to deliver 2 billion doses by the end of 2021,” says Michael J. Nyenhuis, President and CEO of UNICEF USA. "The work that has gone into this milestone is only a reminder of the work that…

Shooting in at #10 for selfies and #9 for national parks, South Africa’s Kruger National Park has made the top 10 list for most popular national parks in the world on TikTok, ParkSleepFly reports. The study looked at the views of national parks across the globe, with Kruger amassing 98.7 million views on TikTok. The Yellowstone National Park is ranked as first in the world, with 630 million views on TikTok, followed by the national parks of Denali, Yosemite, Grand Canyon, Göreme in Turkey, Joshua Tree, Glacier, The Lake District in the UK, Kruger and finally Redwood.…