Technology

Africa Makes its Case for a Bigger Role on the Global Stage

Published

3 hours ago

September 21, 2026

GABI’s Unstoppable Africa 2026 brings global leaders together on Africa’s push to capture more value from its resources, accelerate investment and strengthen its influence in global trade and decision-making.

NEW YORK, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Africa is pushing for a bigger role in shaping the global economy, as business leaders, heads of state, investors, policymakers, and global partners converged in New York yesterday to articulate the continent’s ambition in global trade, investment, and value creation. Held alongside the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly, Unstoppable Africa 2026 put Africa’s business agenda at the center of the global conversation.

The fifth edition of the Global Africa Business Initiative’s (GABI) flagship convening drew senior leaders from across business, government, and global institutions to the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, including UN Secretary-General H.E. António Guterres; H.E. Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, Chairperson of the African Union Commission; and Massad Boulos, Senior Advisor to the President of the United States on Arab and African Affairs.

The UN Secretary-General called for action to give Africa a greater role on the global stage, including a permanent presence on the United Nations Security Council: “Africa needs a permanent presence on the United Nations Security Council, where it can contribute to dialogue and action for the whole globe.” He stressed that Africa’s growing influence in global markets must translate into a stronger voice in international affairs. Guterres also urged reforms to better reflect the needs of developing countries, particularly in Africa, and for the continent’s natural resources, including critical minerals, to generate more local value and decent jobs rather than simply being exported.

With critical minerals, trade, energy, and investment dominating the first day, Unstoppable Africa reflected a wider shift in Africa’s economic story: from supplying the global economy to building more of the businesses, industries, and value chains that can capture the opportunity.

H.E. Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, Chairperson of the African Union Commission, said Africa’s 1.5 billion people and growing market create a significant opportunity, but the continent must accelerate the development of African value chains and remove barriers to trade to drive industrial transformation. He identified affordable energy, better infrastructure, access to finance, skills, technology, and clear standards as critical requirements for Africa to turn its market potential into faster economic growth.

The private sector took center stage, as African and global business leaders articulated what it will take to turn Africa’s resources, markets, and talent into productive economic capacity. The Leaders Panel brought together Samaila Zubairu, President and CEO of the Africa Finance Corporation; Aliko Dangote, Founder and Chairman of the Dangote Group; Mandy DeFilippo, CEO of Americas, Europe, Middle East and Africa at Standard Chartered; Nonkululeko Nyembezi, Chairperson of Standard Bank Group; Nolitha Fakude, Chairperson of Anglo American South Africa; and Tidjane Thiam, General Partner at Allied Critical Minerals Fund.

Leaders stressed the need to move beyond exporting raw materials, including critical minerals and crude oil, by developing local processing, manufacturing, and value chains that create jobs and retain more economic value on the continent.

One of the highlights announced today was that the US$300 million Nigeria Distributed Renewable Energy (DRE) Fund has reached its first close, securing its initial capital commitments and moving into operation. Co-managed by the Nigeria Sovereign Investment Authority (NSIA) and Africa50, the fund will provide equity financing to local clean-energy developers, supporting decentralized solutions including solar mini-grids, solar home systems, commercial and industrial power solutions, and energy storage. Aligned with Mission 300, which aims to connect 300 million Africans to electricity by 2030, the fund is designed to mobilize private investment and expand reliable energy access for Nigerian homes and businesses.

Energy was another major focus. Anna Bjerde, Managing Director of Operations at the World Bank Group, and Damilola Ogunbiyi, CEO and Special Representative of the UN Secretary-General for Sustainable Energy for All, joined discussions on how innovative finance could unlock investment in Africa’s power infrastructure and accelerate access to reliable energy.

Healthcare also featured within the wider economic conversation. Roche reaffirmed its commitment to advancing breast cancer care through its Africa Breast Cancer Ambition (ABCA), which aims to help 80% of women diagnosed with breast cancer in Africa survive for at least five years by 2030.

Unstoppable Africa 2026 continues today, September 21st, with further sessions focused on digital transformation, investment, creative industries, sport, and Africa’s role in the global economy.

Everyone is invited to watch the event live on Unstoppable Africa YouTube channel at https://apo-opa.co/4xoGXlz

SOURCE United Nations Global Compact

Technology

UK digital pathology provider Source BioScience chooses Sectra to enable seamless pathology collaboration across the NHS

Published

24 minutes ago

September 21, 2026

LINKÖPING, Sweden, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — International medical imaging IT and cybersecurity company Sectra (STO: SECT B) has signed an agreement with Source BioScience UK Ltd (Source BioScience) in the UK to deliver its service for advanced share and collaborate workflows. As the first Sectra customer in this domain, Source BioScience will now be able to support NHS organisations that need to send pathology cases to external specialists. This lays the foundation for national telepathology networks in the UK, and for improved access to specialist pathologists.

The service, Sectra Image Exchange Portal (Sectra IEP), is a cloud-based, vendor-neutral platform for exchanging and collaborating around medical images. It is already used by more than 500 institutions, mainly within radiology. Recently, the service has undergone substantial modernisation which now makes it possible for healthcare providers to benefit from new advanced workflow functionality, for the service to be used by specialties other than radiology and for customers to move beyond image sharing to managing workflows between organisations.

“This milestone integration will give the NHS a seamless digital pathway to external specialists, with diagnoses delivered straight back into its own records – reducing turnaround times, easing consultant shortages and tackling reporting backlogs,” says Nick Bills, Healthcare Director at Source BioScience.

Source BioScience is a UK laboratory services provider specialising in histopathology and genomics. Its pathology business supports more than 85 NHS trusts alongside a network of private healthcare clinics, with histopathology delivered from laboratories in Nottingham, Chichester and Cambridge.

NHS pathology services are handling growing case volumes with a limited number of reporting consultants, and increasing subspecialisation means the pathologist best suited to a case is often at another organisation. Sending work to external capacity providers today typically relies on bespoke arrangements between individual laboratories, including the transportation of physical glass slides. This slows reporting times and creates administrative overhead for both the sending and receiving laboratories. With Sectra’s service, a case can be created as a job directly from a laboratory’s worklist, delegated to a receiving organisation, and the completed report returned to the referring organisation’s own records.

“IEP is the backbone of image sharing across the NHS. With our modernised platform, we are introducing advanced workflows between healthcare organisations, and extending that trusted national network into pathology. Connecting trusts directly with external specialists like Source BioScience means cases and completed reports move seamlessly across organisational boundaries. It is a step towards an NHS where expertise is always within reach, and where work moves between organisations as easily as it moves within them,” says Jane Rendall, Managing Director for Sectra UK and Ireland.

The three-year contract was signed in the second quarter of Sectra’s 2026/2027 fiscal year. Up to 60,000 cases are expected during the first year, scaling up in subsequent years.

Source BioScience Media Contact:
Klaudyna Johnstone, Commercial Director, klaudyna.johnstone@sourcebioscience.com

CONTACT:

For further information, please contact: Dr. Torbjörn Kronander, CEO and President Sectra AB, 46 (0) 705 23 52 27
Marie Ekström Trägårdh, Executive Vice President Sectra AB and President Sectra Imaging IT Solutions, 46 (0)708 23 56 10

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

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Technology

askelie® opens its Operational AI Platform to customers and partners

Published

24 minutes ago

September 21, 2026

New platform makes proven AI capabilities available for MSPs, software vendors and business users to configure and compose

LONDON, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — askelie® today announced the launch of its Operational AI Platform, opening the proven technology behind its enterprise AI solutions to MSPs, software vendors and business users.

The platform enables customers and partners to configure and compose AI-powered solutions using proven, reusable askelie capabilities. Rather than building an AI foundation from scratch, organisations can combine existing capabilities to address real business needs — providing a practical route from AI ambition to business value, with faster time to value, lower cost and less risk.

“We’ve spent years using askelie to rapidly deliver enterprise-grade AI solutions. What we’re doing now is opening that capability up,” said Derek Kilroe, CEO and Founder, askelie. “For the first time, MSPs, software vendors and business users can take proven AI capabilities and configure and compose their own solutions for real business operations — without having to build the underlying AI platform themselves.”

Built around Understand • Decide • Act • Control, the platform brings together AI intelligence, data, knowledge, workflows, enterprise integrations, security and governance.

At launch, customers and partners can configure and compose existing capabilities to create and adapt AI-powered Assistants and Automations around specific business needs. The platform provides the foundation for increasingly sophisticated AI applications, including Digital Workers and Autonomous Applications.

“Customers shouldn’t have to assemble an AI technology stack before they can solve a business problem,” said Ian Halliday-Pegg, Chief Product Officer, askelie. “askelie brings the capabilities needed for operational AI together in a platform that can be combined and reused for different needs.”

The platform is designed to be practical, affordable and trusted. Proven, reusable capabilities reduce the need to build enterprise AI from scratch; model choice and consumption-based pricing help control costs; and security, governance, human oversight and auditability are built into the platform.

The platform also enables MSPs to configure and reuse AI-powered services across customers, while software vendors can extend existing products, enhance them with external data and context, and configure new AI-powered capabilities.

The askelie Operational AI Platform is available from 21 September 2026.

For more information, visit www.askelie.io

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SOURCE AskELIE Limited

Technology

Huawei Upgrades Stellar AI WAN Solution to Drive All Intelligence Across Industries

Published

1 hour ago

September 21, 2026

SHANGHAI, Sept. 21, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — At HUAWEI CONNECT 2026, Huawei unveiled its upgraded Stellar AI WAN Solution. Centered on ultimate computing efficiency and multi-dimensional security, this solution addresses cross-region computing challenges in efficiency, cost, and security, driving all intelligence across industries in the AI era.

Stellar AI WAN for Intelligent Connectivity

Amid the rapid expansion of AI computing power, deploying new compute infrastructure in the West has made remote invocation the new norm. However, traditional networks face three critical issues relating to cross-region computing.

Severe efficiency loss: Invoking computing power across 1,000 km can incur a 37% efficiency loss from a mere 0.073% packet loss.High on-premise costs: Local compute deployment costs from 1 million RMB per branch.Expensive private lines: Enterprises spend around 1.2 million RMB annually on 10G private lines.

To address this, Leon Wang, President of Huawei’s Data Communication Product Line, introduced the Stellar AI WAN Solution, enabling lossless delivery of computing power over 1,000 km for a local-like remote computing experience. The XH computing-network appliance uses a unique layerwise model partitioning algorithm to run the initial and final layers of inference locally while offloading intermediate layers to remote infrastructure. With the network transmitting only high-dimensional vectors, raw data remains on-premises. The appliance requires just two xPUs to match a traditional 8-xPU setup, slashing xPU costs by 75%. The updated Starnet lossless algorithm cuts bandwidth idle time by over 80% and reduces required bandwidth fivefold, further lowering cross-region computing costs.

Stellar AI WAN for Security

As global security threats intensify, novel vectors like APTs and HNDL attacks continue to emerge. To address these, Huawei provides a three-layer defense for WANs.

Device layer: Intrinsic security boards detect and block intrusions in real time, tracing threats within minutes at over 95% accuracy.Link layer: Built-in QKD delivers robust quantum security without extra devices or fibers, slashing costs by over 60%. An adaptive noise suppression algorithm extends QKD transmission past 80 km.Network layer: APN6-based data fencing enables network-wide control over traffic paths, ensuring data travels exclusively within secure networks with intrinsic security and quantum encryption deployed.

Looking ahead, Huawei will continually upgrade the Stellar AI WAN Solution, deepening its computing-network synergy and multi-dimensional security. Together with partners, Huawei aims to reinforce the intelligent network foundation and accelerate all intelligence across enterprises.

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SOURCE Huawei