The African Small and Medium Enterprises (SME) Program has been given a four year funding approval worth $125-million together from the African Development Bank (AfDB).

The Fund for African Private Sector Assistance (FAPA) which aims at supporting micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in Africa also granted a $3,98-million technical assistance package.

This programme will provide consistent lines of credit (LoCs), mostly in local currency, and technical assistance to targeted financial institutions, predominantly in low-income countries spread over all five African regions.

The SME Programme will avail important longer-term resources to many SMEs which will have contributed to job creation which is 45 percent growth, poverty reduction and inclusive growth on Africa which contributes to more than 33 percent GDP.

Some studies show that more than 70 percent of SMEs lack access to medium-longer-term finance, creating an SME funding gap of more than USD 140 billion in Africa alone.

60 percent of the available loans are for less than a year. Most of the financial institutions do not have enough knowledge and systems to assess and monitor SME projects they relay on collaterals.

The programme will benefit from the Fund for African Private Sector Assistance (FAPA) support that will give USD3.98 million to provide technical support to building capacities of the 25 participating financial institutions to improve their operational efficiencies.

FAPA is a multi-donor thematic trust fund, financed by the Japanese Government, the AfDB, the Austrian Development Bank and the Government of Austria, that provides grant funding for technical assistance and capacity building to support completion of the AfDB’s Private Sector Development Strategy.

This USD 3.98-million FAPA technical assistance grant for the AfDB Africa SME Programme is the highest amount approved in the history of FAPA.

Intel has singled out its policy to renovate its infrastructure which will allow companies and other users to benefit from an increasingly services-oriented, mobile world.

The chip maker corporation has also disclosed other details about its next-generation Intel Atom processor C2000 product family, as well as outlining its roadmap of next-generation 14nm products.

“Data centres are entering a new era of rapid service delivery,” says Diane Bryant, senior vice president and GM of the Data Centre and Connected Systems Group at Intel.“Across network, storage and servers we continue to see significant opportunities for growth. In many cases, it requires a new approach to deliver the scale and efficiency required, and today we are unveiling the near and long-term actions to enable this transformation.”

Bryant pointed out Intel’s Rack Scale Architecture (RSA), an advanced design that promises to majorly increase the operation and flexibility of the data centre to deliver new services.

Rackspace Hosting, an open cloud company, has announced the deployment of new server racks, a step toward reaching Intel’s RSA vision, powered by Intel Xeon processors and Intel Ethernet controllers with storage accelerated by Intel Solid State Drives. The design is the first commercial rack scale implementation.

Intel also introduced Open Network Platform reference designs to help OEMs build and deploy this new generation of networks.

These new products are to deliver four times the energy efficiency and up to seven times more performance than the first generation Intel Atom processor-based server SoCs introduced in December last year.

Intel has been sampling the new Intel Atom processor server product family to customers since April and has already more than twice the number of system designs compared to the generation last.

The company outlined its roadmap of next-generation products based on its forthcoming 14nm process technology planned for 2014 and beyond.

Intel also disclosed a new SoC designed from the ground up for the data centre based on Intel’s next-generation Broadwell microarchitecture that follows today’s industry leading Haswell microarchitecture. This SoC will offer higher levels of performance in high density, extreme energy efficient systems that data centre operators will expect in this increasingly services-oriented, mobile world.

eKitabu, an East African e-book provider in collaboration with Intel Corporation challenged the Kenyan government to prioritize digitizing education in the country.

Danie Steyn, the General Manager of Intel East Africa exhibited a sample of the programs of Math and English subjects that could be inculcated in the school computers. He said that since the world has now gone digital, such programs should be considered in the school curriculum along side the use of text books.

Mr. Lawrence Njagi, chairman of the Kenya Publishers Association (KPA), in agreement with Intel East Africa GM said that digitizing education is now a necessity and no longer a debate. He however said that the e-books publisher should ensure that the programme should make it more local.

“When an illustration is made in the e-book it should show what is available in the country. If an illustration says Matthew slide in snow, the local version should be Kamau, or any other local name, slide in mud. That will make more sense to the Kenyan child because teaching comes from the known to the unknown,” said Njagi.

The Mr. John Temba director of  ICT, Ministry of Education confirmed that the ICT development in the education sector is being worked on.

“we are working n improving the ICT situation in the sector, we have  advised the cabinet secretary though a memo, on how to implement  the software material in the system and are waiting for response which had been delayed by the teachers strike,” he said

Temba added that added that training of the teachers will also enhance ICT growth as well as acquiring the learning resources in the education sector.

Lawrence Njagi also said that ICT growth is beyond laptops for class one but involves computers for each student. This he said will help students to grow intellectually

“Students from such schools in most cases have higher literacy skills as compared to their counterparts with no computers in school,” he said.

 Former SA President Nelson Mandela is the first South African to receive the country’s new smart ID’s.

Delivered to him during his birthday last week, Madiba is among the first group of South Africans-over 80 years dubbed the ‘Mandela Generation’ who will receive the smart ID’s in phase one. They will be invited to South Africa’s Home Affairs offices according to their dates of birth. The first phase of the ID’s will be processed in 27 Home Affairs’ regional offices. Other offices  will gradually do so over the next three years.

Madiba’s new Smart ID card was delivered to him on his birthday by his daughter, Zindzi Mandela.

 According to Home Affairs Minister Naledi Pandor the smart ID’s are secure and durable as they are made of tamper-proof quality polycarbonate materials. The smart ID’s also have security features like holograms, laser engraving and personal details which can be seen physically and fingerprint biometrics and biographic data embedded smart ID’ 80KB chip. The physical and logical security features will make the ID’s tamper-proof and extremely difficult to forge.

In 8 years, all South African will have the smart ID’s said the Department of Home Affairs.

Apple’s developer website has been hacked. An email released by Apple informed the registered developers. It said that sensitive emails, names and physical addresses could have been conceded. This had forced them to take down the website on Thursday to stop further damage.

Last week in Thursday, a trespasser tried to protect personal information of Apple’s registered developers from their developer website.

“Sensitive personal information was encrypted and cannot be accessed; however, we have not been able to rule out the possibility that some developers’ names, mailing addresses, and/or email addresses may have been accessed. In the spirit of transparency, we want to inform you of the issue. We took the site down immediately on Thursday and have been working around the clock since then,” said Apple.

The multinational corporation company, apple, further said that it will have to do a complete webite renovation in order to prevent a similar security threat from happening again.

The last website shut down was due to a rush on the company’s iOS 7 beta release in early June. This week’s outage, however, was longer-lived – for much of a day – and for a much more damaging reason.

In most Apple hacks that happened previously, have been client –side, often through vulnerabilities in the Java software the company used to ship with OS X, and occasionally via social-engineering attacks on iCloud passwords.

Apple’ worst fear might be that hackers could gain access to its app store or the signing credential technology that certifies iPhone apps as safe, known, and malware-free. Apple does not want its consumers to consider the iOS ecosystem anywhere near as malware-laden as Android sometimes appears to be.

Nigeria’s Universal Service Provision Fund (USPF) will build 5,000 base stations in five years.

Maikano Abdullahi, the secretary USPF, a special fund set up to provide telecommunications and ICT services to undeserved communities said last week Thursday at the unveiling of the funds five year strategic plan, 2013-2017 Strategic Management Plan (SMP).

Abdullahi said they will  focus on implementation of connectivity, which is inclusion of connectivity and access to ensure sustainability of the rural access.

USPF secretary said it will facilitate the building of new telecoms base transceiver stations (BTS) in the rural communities of the country. This is in line with  the new Strategic Management Plan (SMP) 2013-2017, where 1,000 BTS are to be built every year, over a period of five years.

Other key targets include the plan to support the deployment of 15, 000 kilometres of fibre optic cables, laying an average of 3,000km every year; and the deployment of Internet Point of Presence (PoPs) in 25 clusters over five years, with an average of five per year under the Fund’s Rural Broadband Internet (RUBI) scheme.

Also, the secretary disclosed that to achieve the new targets, USPF would, in the next two weeks, come up with Requests for Proposals from telecoms operators that would drive the infrastructure deployment, stressing  that the Fund would ensure there is transparency in the bidding process.This could be achieved through new operating model adopted for the current SPM, which focuses on an integrated approach to project strategy and execution  leading:

1.      to increase participation of industry operators;

2.      ensure implementation of well-planned and adaptable projects which suit a variety of ICT schemes;

3.      ensure availability of telecoms infrastructures in unserved and underserved area for universal access.

Speaking earlier, Joseph Tegbe, Partner, KPMG, the consultancy firm working with USPF on the rural access programme  said the SNMP 2007-2001 programmes and projects were well articulated but the USPF encountered some impediments in executing some of them.

Tegbe said: “There were too many projects. Also, projects were designed and defined using a ‘one size fits all’ approach, thus USP intervention, in some cases, did not directly address the specific needs of the beneficiaries, among others challenges.”

Speaking on the occasion, the Director of Telecoms and Postal Services in the Ministry of Communication Technology, John Ayodele, called for serious collaboration between the USPF, the telecoms operators and other necessary stakeholders to ensure the current SMP records appreciable success.

Naguib Sawiris an Egyptian millionaire told Reuters that his family has plans of increasing their investments in the country to money in billions of dollars. This comes after the July 3 ousting of President Mohammed Morsi by military force.

The millionaire revealed in a phone interview with Reuters, he also said that regardless of Egypt’s attractiveness as an investment destination in the wake of its political uncertainties, he will still go on with his plans.

“My family and I will inject investments in Egypt like never before, in any new projects we could invest in,” Sawiris said.

Being the oldest son of construction magnate Onsi Sawiris, the millionaire sad that his family is ready launch new projects and undertake new initiatives that could provide jobs for the young people of Egypt.

“There is no going back from what happened beginning on 30 June, and I am confident that Egypt’s temporary government understands its current role and is aware of what its priorities should be in the coming months. This provides us, as investors, with new business opportunities, particularly in the hotel and tourist industries,” said
Sawiris.

He added: “The removal of this fascist regime has led to a nationwide revival, which will lead to increases in rates of tourism, in addition to creating a more enlightened country.”

Naguib Sawiris, who is also a politician and  co-founder of Egypt’s Al Masreyeen Al Ahrrar  political party, has been a vocal critic of Morsi’s regime.

He left the country last year after Morsi was elected into power. He only returned to Egypt in May after a few senior executives who work with his Orascom Construction Industries were cleared of charges related to tax evasion, including Naguib’s brother Nassef Sawiris.

During his self-imposed exile, his political party participated in several anti-Morsi demonstrations. His privately-owned television station, ONTV regularly aired shows that criticized the regime.

The Sawiris family controls the Orascom Group, Egypt’s largest conglomerate, which owns interests in construction, telecom, hotels and technology and employs over 100,000 people.

Online payments and money transfers firm, PayPal, made one of its account holder’s richer with an astounding USD 92quadrillion last week by mistake.

The account owner Chris Reynold a resident of Delaware County said that he initially thought it was a debt, until he realized they had credited his account.

The email he was sent by the company stated that his balance stood at $92,233,720,368,547,800, although when he went to check the figure on the website, it showed a more usual balance of zero.

That amount of money is roughly equivalent to 14 months worth of the entire planet’s Gross Domestic Productivity.

Reynolds has been a PayPal customer for about 10 years, using it mainly for eBay transactions.

A side note, this reveals that in some way, the PayPal account balance tables in their database has the ability to carry values greater than the planet’s annual GDP — which maybe an indication of how large the firm thinks its financial services will grow to in the future.

Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the coordinating minister of Nigeria’s and Finance Minister urged Nigerians to support home-grown unique equipment manufacturers.

The minister added that it is only through that way that technology could be transferred; new job opportunities will be created as well as assurance of a good life for the citizens.

This she said during a tour of the factory of Omatek Computers which is situated in Lagos. Okonjo-Iweala believed that instead of looking up to the Federal Government for sponsorship, Nigerians should support locally made electronics search as PCs, tablets and other ICT accessories.

“We will only succeed in this country if we patronise our own products. Let us look unto ourselves and leave government. If we patronise our own goods, we will grow the economy,” she said, adding that with a population of over 150 million people, the multiplier effect on the economy of patronising indigenous OEMs could only be imagined.

She also enjoined the Group Managing Director of Omatek Computers, Engineer Florence Seriki, to make her products competitive in terms of quality, insisting that it was only by doing so that her products could beat the competition posed by imported goods. She also urged her to look to the private sector for patronage instead of looking up to the government.

A while ago,the engineer conducted the minister around the expansive factory, where the government delegation was amazed by the huge investment Omatek had committed to the factory. 

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) declared that the licensing renewal agreement between EA Sports will not push through.  Electronic Arts (EA) Sports license will expire in June 2014; this means that the upcoming NCAA 2014 will be the last college football game released under the license.

The NCAA games were strong and expected and were a source of revenue for the EA Sports; however the games did not make so much money and was not as popular worldwide as FIFA.

Apart from making college football the company had also made a footprint in college basketball as well as baseball in the past. EA Sports had signed a deal in 2005 which had given them an exclusive license to NCAA teams, logos and a major competitive advantage over their major rival 2K. These are some of the things that the company would loose out on.

This piece of information doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be the end of the EA Sports making it to the NCAA games; it only means that they will have to negotiate with ever team and school at an individual level which is quite costly.

Disagreements are not something new to these college games and the license problem could be a result of a disagreement. Electronic Arts was hit with a class-action lawsuit accusing that the company’s licensing deals effectively gave it a monopoly over sports games, which it settled last year for USD27 million. Part of the contract in that resolution was that it would not enter into any other such agreements for five years.

It’s also gotten in trouble for including actual student athletes in its games, a no-no because college athletes are not supposed to be professionals and aren’t paid for their likenesses. Another class action lawsuit is ongoing about that.