Contador Harrison

A new study shows that Ugandans are drowning in debt and some are showing the desperate lengths of gambling addicts that is synonymous with addicts in Far East Asian countries and Las Vegas in United States. Majority are foreign owned betting firms that have prompted a surge in illegal gambling rings according to the study. Ugandans known world over for their creative minds have devised a way of using the official lottery as the basis for an illegal game, where punters predict the last two lotto numbers of the standard daily draw. For example, social media was awash with news of a naïve business man predicted the match between Manchester City and Barcelona played last night where the latter emerged 2-0 victorious and will be forced to eventually sell his house in order to pay his creditors. The study shows that sports betting in Uganda has ruined hundreds of families and is tearing apart the fabric of Ugandan society and has resulted in cases of divorce.  Despite the ...

The technology industry is betting big on the cloud, mobile Internet and the automating of knowledge to be the key technologies transforming the way people live and work in Africa. In South Africa home to the most technologically advanced organizations, firms are expected to deliver powerful capabilities for consumers and employees to create and connect through a secure and reliable technology infrastructures. According to latest business outlook, many businesses are expected to move towards converged systems that provide powerful, mobile Internet-scale applications. The adoption is expected to help organizations in the continent meet the pressure to streamline operations, drive their profit margins upwards and continued growth, trim their costs and improve business efficiency. Latest statistics from International Data Corporation showed that globally vendors are forecast to ship close to 2 billion mobile phones this year, growing to more than 2.2 billion devices in the ne...

In a study to be released soon, it has been found that women makes up less than 10% of board members in listed companies across Africa. It is not often that African women tops a list of those selected for corporate governance, and the fact that the region is a laggard in boardroom gender diversity is a concern. However, corporate boardrooms across the continent are changing fast and gender diversity in the boardroom is increasingly seen as strength and helps generate new ideas and new ways of doing business. African Women have always played a key role in continent’s economies especially in agriculture industry but their presence at the highest levels of the corporate has been limited and curtailed by their male chauvinists. A Gender Diversity Report in 2012 found that African countries have one of the fastest growing percentage of women represented in corporate boardrooms in the world but still remains under 10% and lags behind developed markets such as the North Ameri...

East African governments have released a series of encouraging economic figures, including stronger-than-expected GDP growth for last quarter of 2013, which has boosted the regional economic expansion for last year. That ended months of guessing about whether the region would post weak quarterly GDP figure. Consumer confidence is also said to have risen this month with the biggest increase shown in the Uganda, Rwanda and Tanzania stock market investment outlook and economic outlook over the next six months with Kenya stock markets expected to register modest growth. The index of economic monitoring indicators indicates that the economy should be on track by the second quarter of 2014. However, according to an financial analyst in the region who shared with me these figures, the reported positive notes do not guarantee significant or comfortable growth for the economies in the region, as the optimism has primarily been built on expectations about the revival of European ec...