According to Kyle Durham at FNB Commercial, electricity prices have significantly increased over the past three decades, compared with inflation over the same period. This challenge, coupled with energy uncertainty remains a critical concern for South African businesses. Although loadshedding has reduced, there is no guarantee that it will not return.

Even in the continued absence of loadshedding, local power outages remain common especially in remote, rural, and poorer communities. There is also a persistent chance of normal interruptions to grid supply, caused by extreme weather, infrastructural damage, theft, and other factors.

Because electricity in South Africa is typically generated through a mixture of coal and diesel, this significantly contributes to nearly half of the country’ s greenhouse gas emissions. Carbon-intensive sources of power can mean the difference between a contract or tender being refused and initiatives such as the European Union’ s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism.

This means that punitive levies could potentially be applied to South African exports that use this power as an input. South Africa could significantly reduce its carbon footprint, lower energy costs, and improve the reliability of energy supply by adopting renewable energy.

And in this month’ s cover feature we look at how Nigeria based Moniepoint, which provides financial solutions for Nigeria’ s SMBs, grappled with handling increasing transaction loads. It required manual effort to access and fix data, delaying customer access to their transactions.

Moniepoint has now scaled to support over two million businesses since its founding in 2015 using Confluent Cloud. Moniepoint has scaled from processing hundreds of thousands of requests to millions of requests using this solution. Successful integration of Confluent Cloud has been instrumental in ensuring the platform’ s reliability, scalability, adaptability.

Turn these pages to read more about the digital transformation that is taking place across Africa.

And in this month’ s Editor’ s Question, executives from Commvault, Galix, Armata Cyber Security, In2IT Technologies, share their perspectives on what are the cyber security best practices that can be adopted by African enterprises?

Wishing you the best of business success in the month ahead and Eid Mubarak.

Arun Shankar Managing Editor arun @ lynchpinmedia. com

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