Biz Hub Africa

Nigeria is Africa's largest oil producer, pumping over two million barrels a day. For decades, the country has relied heavily on the oil sector to bring in taxes and foreign exchange. But the drop in the oil price has knocked the value of the local currency - the naira - by nearly 20%. Those immediately affected are ordinary people, and also the new generation of investors who only entered the oil and gas businesses in recent years.

How has the cloud changed your world? Think about it. The cloud has transformed our daily lives, whether it’s for everyday use in business or how we use social media after work. It’s become an increasingly essential technology for driving creativity and collaboration, capable of altering the very fabric of society. As the cloud market grows, it’s crucial to make it even more accessible and comprehensive for startups. Though almost all startups today already use the cloud, the information technology (IT) industry needs to open up the cloud more broadly for startups. Doing so would serve to level the competitive playing field for existing companies and entrepreneurs around the world. Here are three ways we can help startups use the cloud for its maximum potential: 1. Free access to the cloud: Young companies need a strong IT infrastructure to quickly launch their businesses and spend their resources and time on coding, building and scaling their innovations — not ...

     Whether you’ve ever been a consultant before or not, I hope you’ll start thinking of yourself as a consultant in 2015. You are the CEO of your own business . Your career is your business! You can’t let your employer run your career —  not that most employers are sitting around worrying about their employees’ careers, if we are honest. You have to run your own career, and that means knowing what problem you solve for your employers. If you think about it, a full-time employee is just a consultant with only one client. I hope you’ll take the next step in 2015 and get a consulting business card. You can consult at night and on the weekends. It’s a very good thing to do, not just for the extra income but for the mojo boost and the understanding of the market that a part-time consulting business gives you. My daughter was just 19 when she started a music theory coaching business. She was happily surprised to find that people who pay fif...

     Since the onset of the financial crisis back in 2007, the level of debt across the world has continued to grow steadily. According to a McKinsey and Global Institute study , global debt has increased by $57 trillion (40.1 percent) over the past seven years. By the second quarter of 2014, global debt stood at just under $200 trillion. In the fourth quarter of 2007, total debt as a share of GDP stood at 269 percent but that increased to 286 percent by the second quarter of 2014. China in particular has experienced a meteoric rise in its debt levels . During the same seven-year period, real estate and shadow banking propelled Chinese debt nearly four-fold from $7 trillion to $28 trillion .