Wednesday, December 26, 2018

The World's Premier Conference on Urban Development


Saturday, December 15, 2018

Ne La Thiass by Cheikh Lo


Rebecca Gaskin Gain is an accomplished business and legal advisor with extensive investment planning and management experience. When she isn’t working, she is a fan of indigenous African music from Congo and Senegal. One of Rebecca Gaskin Gain’s favorite Senegalese singers is Cheikh Lo.

A native of Burkina Faso, Senegal, Cheikh Lo taught himself to play guitar and drums as a child. At the age of 21, he got his professional start as percussionist with the popular regional group Orchestra Volta Jazz. 

Cheikh Lo established himself as a viable solo artist in 1996 with the release of his debut album Ne La Thiass. Roughly translated as “gone in a flash,” Ne La Thiass blends the Mande, Wolof, and Congolese musical styles of West Africa with the Cuban music that first rose to popularity in Africa during Cheikh Lo’s youth.

Senaglese superstar Youssou N’Dour decided to produce this benchmark album after hearing a rough demo of Cheikh Lo’s music. The musicians backing Mr. Lo on Ne La Thiass hailed from Youssou N’Dour’s band, Super Etoile.

Monday, December 10, 2018

Addressing SME Funding Issues


As a principal with Washington, DC’s Nexant, Rebecca Gaskin Gain advises on a range of African power projects with involvement from the US federal government. Over the years she has conducted and developed businesses in multiple international sectors. One of Rebecca Gaskin Gain’s key areas of professional interest is SME (small and medium enterprise) finance.

Due to the very nature of small and medium enterprises, SME funding presents many significant challenges. Smaller business ventures are generally younger, more informally structured, and offer fewer publicly available statistics, facts, and figures. They also tend to operate in unfamiliar businesses sectors and possess fewer assets to put up as collateral.

Given these challenges, business leaders and policy makers have developed several strategies to broaden SME financing access. These strategies include the establishment of credit information-sharing initiatives that encourage banks to fund SMEs. Other attempts to boost SME financing operations range from public credit guarantees for SME investment to legal reforms that allow movable assets to serve as collateral. In many cases, government initiatives have provided SME funding outside of the bank system by establishing secondary exchanges.