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From the ashes of war, Sierra Leone rises with Solar-Powered Youth Hubs

What is a pragmatic recipe for a low-cost Youth Entrepreneurship Hub in a country like Sierra Leone? Get a shipping container, fit it with air-conditioning, work desks and chairs. Then add PCs, internet access and solar panels to provide electricity, and you get the picture of Sierra Leone’s Solar-Powered youth hubs

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What is a pragmatic recipe for a low-cost Youth Entrepreneurship Hub in a country like Sierra Leone? Get a shipping container, fit it with air-conditioning, work desks and chairs. Then add PCs, internet access and solar panels to provide electricity, and you get the picture of Sierra Leone’s Solar-Powered youth hubs.

Computer Aid International is a non-profit organization that combines IT asset disposal with global development. Earlier in the year, CAI installed two Youth Entrepreneurship Hubs in Makeni and Pujehun in Sierra Leone. As described above, they are both solar-powered.

The containers do not look so special from the outside, but step inside and the picture changes. They could pass for a mini mission control centre in a blockbuster movie.

The town of Pujehun has no electric power, with diesel generators being the only source of power for many. In addition, it has no public computers nor ICT training centres. The situation is largely the same at Makeni, though there is public power supply.

The solar powered Zuba boxes, as they are called, are self-sustaining. These Youth Entrepreneurship Hubs are part of a project that reportedly provides 1,230 young people with vital digital business skills.

Sierra Leone’s solar-powered youth hubs are giving quite a number of students their first exposure to many much needed skills, including typing, computer usage, web browsing, and more.

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Kenya, Uganda settle oil import dispute

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In an effort to patch things up between the two neighbours, Kenya will permit Uganda’s landlocked state oil company to import petroleum products through its port of Mombasa, the country’s energy ministry said on Thursday.

After decades of receiving their cargo through affiliated firms in Kenya, Uganda has been looking for alternative ways to import petroleum products, including through a port in Tanzania. According to Solomon Muyita, a spokesman for Uganda’s ministry of minerals and energy, the first shipment under the new arrangement is scheduled for May.

“Kenya has agreed to give us a licence, UNOC (Uganda National Oil Company) is now free to import through Mombasa,” he said.

According to reports, UNOC would use the Kenya Pipeline Company to transport the goods, so Kenya would still profit from the agreement, according to Kenyan Energy Minister Davis Chirchir.

In 2022, Uganda imported petroleum products valued at $1.6 billion, the majority of which came from the Gulf. Kenya serves as the import gateway for about 90% of the goods.

It declared in November that it would transfer all exclusive petroleum product supply rights to a division of the international energy trader Vitol, which would subsequently supply UNOC.

According to what the government said at the time, using Kenyan companies to import oil had “exposed Uganda to occasional supply vulnerabilities” whereby Ugandan retail companies were viewed as secondary whenever there were supply disruptions changing retail prices.

The two African nations that make up the Great Lakes are partners in a variety of fields, including trade, infrastructure, energy, education, agriculture, and military security.

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No plan to increase taxes, Nigeria’s revenue chief says

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The head of Nigeria’s revenue agency, Zacch Adedeji, has reaffirmed that there is no plan for the introduction of new taxes in the country.

Adedeji, who is the Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue, made the position known when the Chief Executive Officer of Guinness Nigeria Plc, Adebayo Alli, led the management team of the company on a visit to the Revenue House in Abuja.

He was quoted as saying, “the President gave a directive that he wants a single digit tax in the country, meaning that the maximum number of taxes we will have after the work of the Presidential Committee on Fiscal Policy and Tax Reforms will be nine taxes,” in a statement signed by the Special Adviser on Media to the FIRS chairman, Dare Adekanmbi.

“For us at FIRS, we have responded to that directive. We want to grow the pie such that even if we are taking the same percentage of the bigger pie, the result will be huge.

“By God’s grace, we will not introduce additional taxes nor increase any form of tax. We are only determined to increase the pie. We have restructured our operations at FIRS in such a way that we are now effectively carrying out our duty of assessing, collecting and accounting for taxes. We used to have functional types of taxes, but we have identified that the only customers we have are the taxpayers.”

He stated that by restructuring “our operations based on our customers, using their turnover as the basis to categorise them into large, medium, and small,” FIRS has enhanced its customer relations. He continued by saying that President Bola Tinubu wanted to increase Nigerians’ purchasing power in order to promote growth and increase businesses’ capacity for productivity through the recently implemented consumer credit scheme.

The Nigerian government has been working to overhaul the nation’s monetary and fiscal policies since the start of the Bola Tinubu administration. This has resulted in the central bank and the Oyedele-led tax advisory council implementing daring new policies.

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