By MIKE OMUODO

The African Trade & Investment Development Insurance (ATIDI), and the Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), part of World Bank Group Guarantees, have signed a three-year partnership to accelerate foreign direct investment across Africa. This is the second agreement between the two organizations aimed at maximising development impact. 

The organizations will collaborate by leveraging ATIDI's expertise in insurance and guarantee products across the African continent and MIGA's range of guarantee solutions and guarantee expertise through the World Bank Group guarantee platform. The partnership will also seek to improve efficiency in joint project due diligence, maximising cost savings and eliminating duplication.

 Quote from Manuel Moses, CEO, ATIDI

"Enabling more investment to finance transformational projects is vital to Africa's sustained development. MIGA and ATIDI's de-risking solutions are essential to achieve this crucial agenda. Beyond signing of this agreement, we look forward to a dynamic collaboration with MIGA, to leverage our institutions' respective assets for the benefit of our continent." 

The agreement framework emphasizes mutual reliance, accountability, and comparability. Each party will regularly share operating standards and procedures to help identify comparable outcomes to further both organizations' development mandates. 

Quote from Hiroshi Matano, MIGA Executive Vice President

"Our partnership with ATIDI will enable us to support countries in Africa in scaling and replicating development projects, thereby accelerating prosperity. This agreement will play a significant role in helping the continent attract foreign investment for key development projects."   

Both organizations have agreed to set up mechanisms to measure progress and results, including reports on joint projects, new products, capital mobilized, and reduced project processing times. Moreover, both parties will carry out joint marketing efforts, training, and seminars to strengthen cooperation and explore new investment opportunities in Africa. 

The strategic agreement framework underscores the commitment of MIGA and ATIDI to create a world free of poverty on a liveable planet. The two organizations aim to mitigate investment risks by pooling resources, thereby accelerating sustainable economic growth in Africa.

ATIDI was founded in 2001 by African States to cover trade and investment risks of companies doing business in Africa. ATIDI predominantly provides Political Risk, Credit Insurance and Surety Insurance. Since inception, ATIDI has supported USD85 billion worth of investments and cross border trade into Africa. For over a decade, ATIDI has maintained an 'A/Stable' rating for Financial Strength and Counterparty Credit by Standard & Poor's, and in 2019, ATIDI obtained an A3/Stable rating from Moody's, which has now been upgraded to A2/Positive.

Minister of Foreign Affairs and Emigration Badr Abdelatty discussed in a phone call with his Ugandan counterpart Jeje Odongo means to boost bilateral ties and a number of regional and African issues. 

In the call, Abdelatty expressed Egypt’s keenness on promoting bilateral ties between Egypt and Uganda in the different political, economic and developmental fields, Spokesman for the Foreign Ministry Tamim Khallaf said on Thursday.

In the call, the two ministers exchanged points of view on a number of issues of mutual interest in light of the challenges facing the African continent and the pivotal role of both countries to support peace, security and stability in the continent. MENA

Wildlife tourism rangers could be a “powerful” force in conservation monitoring, according to the results of a research project in Uganda.

Surveying wildlife is a costly and difficult part of conservation. But this project, done with African lions in Uganda, found that local rangers were well-equipped to dramatically improve the data.

A paper describing the study, by an international team of researchers and Ugandan rangers, is published in Communications Biology.

“What you’ll typically find in a lot of these research settings in Africa and Asia is, to be quite blunt, rangers are often used as security personnel,” lead author Dr Alexander Braczkowski, a conservation biologist at Griffith University, tells Cosmos.

“They don’t really have much collaborative inclusion in this process, so that they themselves can jump into the scientific process.”

This is at odds with their expertise, according to Braczkowski.

“There’s more than 250,000 rangers that are installed in the global conservation force, and they obviously have immensely close and intimate relationships with wildlife and wild places. They probably know these places better than anybody.”

The project was part of a larger survey, establishing African lion populations across Uganda.

“We did workshops, and we taught a very wide variety of stakeholders, essentially, how to survey lions,” says Braczkowski.

At one site, Murchison Falls National Park, Braczkowski and colleagues worked with rangers from the Uganda Wildlife Authority.

“They have a very, very, very intimate understanding of lion behaviour, where lions are hiding, which thickets they’re using, spatially, which parts of the landscapes they’re occurring in,” says Braczkowski.

“This was the first scientific study of wildlife where I directly participated and my first entry point into science,” says co-author Lilian Namukose, a ranger with the Wildlife Authority.

“Through rigorous training in three workshops across three national parks, we quickly learnt to incorporate lion data collection alongside our daily field duties.”

Namukose and her colleague, co-author Silvan Musobozi, recorded 102 detections of lions across 76 days, giving the researchers valuable ecological data. These included multiple photos of each lion, so that the researchers could identify individuals.

For comparison, the team also set up 64 expensive infra-red camera traps in the area. These state-of-the-art devices recorded 2 usable detections over 1,601 nights.

The team concludes that tapping into ranger knowledge can improve both ecological data, and give rangers an opportunity to be more involved in conservation research and management decisions.

“You could just get so much more return on investment by bringing rangers into the scientific process,” says Braczkowski.

“Through capacity building and training, rangers can be better incorporated into the scientific and management process,” says Musobozi. By