Transportation startup Gozem recently entered the Beninese market, providing tricycles in Cotonou and Lomé.  

This marks the firm’s first step towards its African expansion.

While launching the new service, Gozem’s founder, Emeka Ajene, said: “By launching this service, what we provide our customers across the region are safe options at affordable rates for all occasions.”

Séna Akoda

India has provided Togo a million dollars to preserve biodiversity in the Fazao-Malfakassa national park. The project launched yesterday, July 15, will be carried out by UNESCO, revealed the institution’s representative in Togo, Damien Mama.

In effect, the new project will foster a better management of protected areas and this will involve various parties, including surrounding communities. It should also create 350 green jobs.

The project’s final goal is to get the Fazao-Malfakassa Park listed on the UNESCO’s biosphere reserves as well as participating in the development of green economies. It also reflects how buoyant the South-South cooperation is.

The Fazao-Malfakassa Park is Togo’s largest national park. It is situated between the Kara and Centrale regions.

Vivendi’s Togolese subsidiary, GVA-Togo, just launched a new service called “Start”. This is a broadband offer which costs CFA15,000, half what the company’s first offer, CanalBox, cost.

The new offer which falls under the Fiber to the Home project aims at making broadband accessible to all.

“With our Start offer, many Togolese households can enjoy broadband via fiber optics, for only XOF15,000 per month,” says Alexandre Cohen, Managing Director GVA-Togo. The speed of the new connection is 10Mbps.

In Togo, a new guarantee fund of XOF100 million has been put in place by various banks for local SMEs and SMIs. The monies will help “business operators who struggle secure public procurements,” according to a senior official from the National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (CCIT) which put in place the fund.

Businesses interested in benefiting from the fund must first register on a dedicated form.

Besides this fund, there is another established by the national agency for the promotion and guarantee of financing for SMEs/SMIs.

Séna Akoda

Moody’s, just after S&P, delivered its first ratings for Togo. The ratings agency indeed gave the country a B3 rating with stable outlook, while S&P gave it a B rating.

The ratings come as Togo plans this quarter to issue a Eurobond seeking €500 million. The move was comforted by successful Eurobonds issued recently by some neighboring nations.

Monies raised through the Eurobond will be used to refinance short-debt internal debt.

According to the IMF which greenlit the operation, it should not prevent Togo from meeting WAEMU’s convergence criteria by 2020. Public debt should fall below 70% by the same year. Last March, let’s recall, it fell below 67%.

Togo will over the next 10 years clear all its domestic arrears, in line with its medium-term debt strategy. This amounts to XOF225.5 billion which is 10.3% of the country’s public debt.

Lomé plans to pay this year XOF35.4 billion, after having paid more than XOF50 billion in 2017 and XOF65 billion in 2018. This is good news for the private sector which is expected to contribute 65% of the funds needed by the country for its five-year national development plan.

Togo’s efforts to clear all its domestic arrears come after it committed, to the IMF, to progressively do so. Multiple measures were actually taken at the end of 2017, to prevent more arrears from piling up.

In Togo, the Economic Governance Support Project (PAGE) goes in line with the expectations of the World Bank and the European Union (EU) which finances it.

Hawa Cissé Wagué, representative resident of the World Bank in Togo said she is satisfied with the project in an interview with Erick Kaglan, Head of Communications at World Bank Togo. She declared: “I am very satisfied with progress made on the PAGE over the last months.”

The project, she adds, helped boost “public finance management capacities of the State’s monitoring institutions such as the General Inspectorate of Finance, the Audit Court and the Commission for Finance and Economic Development of the National Assembly.”   The PAGE helped “elaborate tools necessary for the budget orientation debate such as the manual for the assessment and inclusion of key public investment projects (PIP) in annual budget, and the multi-year economic and budget programming document (DPBEP).”

She also noted progress made regarding the reform of the program budget.

Comforted by the progress, the World Bank urged public authorities to continue its efforts for budget reform, enabling Togo to successfully achieve its budget transition. The latter consists in shifting from a resource budget to a program budget.

Togo is expected to adopt a program budget in 2020. In this framework, the World Bank organized on July 7-9, 2019, a session to train members of the parliament’s commission for finance and economic development. The session aimed at enabling the commission play its role in preparing the country’s budget for 2020.

Séna Akoda