Category Archives: Bloomberg

Idea Exchange: Bloomberg and Reuters financial journalism training

Bloomberg: The Bloomberg Media Initiative Africa Financial Journalism Training program has resumed. After four years of training financial journalists in Kenya, South Africa and Nigeria, the BMIA now moves on to Ghana, Zambia, Tanzania, Cote d’Ivoire and Senegal.

In the first part of the new phase, participating universities are the Ghana Institute of Journalism and University of Ghana Business School in Ghana, and the University of Zambia and University of Lusaka School of Business in Zambia. That does not mean journalists from other countries are excluded, but they have to travel to physically attend classes at the local universities,  that run from January 2019 to June 2019, for two weeks in each month.

AMIB50 chart by Bloomberg

The program is worth about $22,000 and is greatly subsidized by Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Stavros Niarchos Foundation, with the students not expected to pay more than $250. Students must also have a laptop computer and commit to attending all the classes. For the duration of the class, they also get prized access to the Blomberg terminal, an invaluable information resource for researching global financial markets. The deadline for applications is November 30. 

Reuters: The Reuters Journalism Training Programme – EMEA targets early journalists, with not more than three years experience, to undertake a nine-month training program, that includes with one month in London, and on the job training in bureaus in Africa, Europe and the Middle East.

Applicants must have an interest in issues that affect companies, markets and economies and there seems to a preference for journalists with experience in areas like banking, financial analysis, accounting, law or computer science. The deadline for applications is November 30.

Nairobi hosts the 7th BAFM – Building African Financial Markets seminar

This week sees Nairobi host the 7th Building African Financial Markets (BAFM) seminar with the theme of “adaptive innovation as a lever for growth and sustainable development of financial markets”. 

News of the seminar was unveiled by Nairobi Securities Exchange (NSE) CEO, Geoffrey Odundo in January 2018 when Barclays launched its Africa Financial Markets Index (AFMI) report in Nairobi. The Barclays AFMI measured African stock exchanges by six pillars of market depth, access to foreign exchange, market transparency, macro-opportunity, enforceability of agreements and capacity of local investors, and it ranked South Africa on top, with Kenya in fifth place.

The NSE and the African Securities Exchanges Association are organizers of the BAFM event with  Bloomberg and Barclays as gold sponsors. The ASEA, which was founded in 1993 with the Nairobi Stock Exchange as the first member, now has a membership of 40 African stock exchanges.

The BAFM will be officially opened by William Ruto, the Deputy President of the Republic of Kenya. It will feature leaders and speakers from organizations such as Nasdaq, the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, EFG-Hermes – a Cairo-based investment bank that is new to Nairobi, and Safaricom, while some of the sessions of great interest are likely to include “a blueprint for orderly markets in Africa”, M-Akiba; the $30 mobile-phone government bond as a disruptive technology reshaping African financial markets, “building new markets in frontier economies”, a guide for managing cyber risk, linking African exchanges organically, and “is blockchain the future of finance or a flash in the pan?”.