Month: July 2021

Mastercard released Recovery Insights: Ready for Takeoff? – A view into key travel trends in the air and on the ground, around the world. While the global travel recovery remains uneven, a rebound in ground travel and pick-up in domestic flight bookings are showing encouraging signs.

The report, developed by the Mastercard Economics Institute, draws on aggregated and anonymized sales activity across the global Mastercard network to better understand the next phase for travel, its drivers and challenges. This includes the balance between leisure and business, local and long-distance, and saving and spending. The report also looks at the spending categories seeing an uptick and what they signal for travel recovery. Read More

The East African Community (EAC) will this financial year prioritise harmonisation of air charges and taxes in a bid to reduce the cost of intra-EAC air travel, according to Mr Adan Mohamed, the Council of Ministers chairperson.

While reading the EAC 2021/22 budget, Mr Mohamed, who is also Kenya’s Minister for EAC, said the civil aviation and airports sub-sector, although there has been some delays, will focus on implementation of the EAC Upper Airspace Seamless Operations earmarked under the 2017-22 project. Read More

The World Bank announced a partnership with the African Union Tuesday to finance the acquisition and distribution of COVID-19 vaccine for 400 million people in Africa.

In a remote news conference via Zoom, World Bank Managing Operations Director Axel van Trotsenburg said the World Bank is providing $12 billion to not only acquire but deploy 400 million doses of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine — a single dose shot — in support of the Africa Vaccine Acquisition Task Team (AVATT) initiative.

The announcement comes a day after African finance ministers and the World Bank Group met to fast-track vaccine acquisition on the continent and avoid a third wave of COVID-19. Read More