Zimbabwe gave up its unenviable position of having the world’s highest interest rate to Argentina, after slashing borrowing costs to help boost economic growth, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary policy committee cut the benchmark interest rate to 130% from 150%, which lags Argentina’s 133%. The MPC acted because of “emerging global risks and the need to keep exchange rate and inflation expectations anchored to support economic growth,” Governor John Mangudya said in an emailed statement on Tuesday.

A senior U.S. Treasury official on Monday said there were signs of "potential improvement" in sovereign debt restructuring cases and more vulnerable countries were expected to seek help, but further work was needed to accelerate the process, Reuters reported. Treasury Assistant Secretary for International Finance Brent Neiman noted advances in the cases of Zambia, Ghana and Sri Lanka over the past year, along with development of new technical approaches, adding his hope that Ghana would reach agreement on its external restructuring in the coming weeks.

South Africa’s strained public finances are hindering economic growth and a return to lower inflation, the country’s central bank cautioned on Tuesday, Bloomberg News reported. “Reducing public debt to sustainable levels can deliver a triple dividend, namely lower cost of capital, reduced debt-service costs and lower inflation,” the South African Reserve Bank said in its six-monthly Monetary Policy Review. The comments come ahead of a Nov. 1 update on the nation’s budget outlook by Finance Minister Enoch Godongwana.

Kenya’s President William Ruto sought $1 billion more in loans from China Monday, despite rising public debt that has now reached $70 billion in the Eastern African country, according to National Treasury figures for 2022/2023, the Associated Press reported. President Ruto was was one of a number of global leaders in Beijing to attend the tenth anniversary meeting of China’s Belt and Road Initiative, the ambitious plan that aims to connect Africa, Asia and Europe through massive infrastructure and energy projects.

Zambia’s official creditor committee plans to sign a memorandum of understanding to restructure $6.3 billion of debt by the close of the International Monetary Fund’s annual meeting next week, Bloomberg News reported. The nation’s dollar bonds rallied. The government has made slow progress in talks since June, when it reached a deal-in-principle with the committee co-led by China and France. The agreement would see the interest rates cut to as low as 1% and the loans only repaid in 2043, with a 40% reduction in net-present value of the debt.

South Africa's overall mining profits slipped by more than $5 billion in the last financial year, while the country that was once the world's largest gold producer might have less than 30 years of a viable gold industry left without renewed investment, according to a new report by big four auditing firm PwC, the Associated Press reported. The report released Tuesday also estimated that South Africa's iron ore mining industry may only last 13 more years without further commitment from companies to identify, pursue and extract new deposits.

A Kenyan parliamentary panel called on the country's information technology regulator on Monday to shut down the operations of cryptocurrency project Worldcoin within the country until more stringent regulations are put in place, Reuters reported. The government suspended the project in early August following privacy objections over its scanning of users' irises in exchange for a digital ID to create a new "identity and financial network". Worldcoin was rolled out in various countries around the world by Tools for Humanity, a company co-founded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman.

When Olayemi Cardoso takes full control of Nigeria‘s central bank this week, his biggest challenges will be to restore its credibility after eight years of mismanagement, boost confidence in Africa’s worst-performing currency and slow an inflation rate that’s among the highest on the continent, Bloomberg News reported. Since taking office in May, President Bola Tinubu has instituted a raft of new policies — scrapping a $10 billion annual fuel subsidy and liberalizing the foreign-exchange market. The reforms were much-needed, but crippled an economy long on its knees.

South Africa’s central bank kept its benchmark interest rate unchanged, while signaling that borrowing costs are likely to stay higher for longer because of persistent inflation risks, Bloomberg News reported. The monetary policy committee maintained the rate at a 14-year high of 8.25% for a second consecutive meeting, Governor Lesetja Kganyago said at a briefing north of Johannesburg on Thursday. That matched the median estimate of 26 economists in a Bloomberg survey. “The job of tackling inflation is not yet done,” Kganyago said. “Risks remain.

Cryptocurrency usage is growing in Nigeria as Africa's largest economy grapples with a weakening currency and soaring inflation, New York-based blockchain research firm Chainalysis said in a report on Tuesday, Reuters reported. Nigeria's volume of crypto transactions grew 9% year-over-year to $56.7 billion between July 2022 and June 2023. In Uganda, crypto use is smaller but growing fast, rising 245% to $1.6 billion in the same period, while its use in Kenya fell more than a half to $8.4 billion, the report said.