This podcast is brought to you by the Bearing Man Group - Africa's finest source of quality engineering components and expertise.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009.

From Creamer Media in Johannesburg, I'm Shannon O'Donnell.

Making headlines today:

The Development Bank of Southern Africa has estimated South Africa's total funding gap for infrastructure projects at 150-billion-rand over the year. CEO Paul Baloyi believes that up to half of that could be secured by "properly leveraging" the country's development finance institutions, or DFIs.

He said that there was a growing funding gap to finance the country's infrastructure spend, which was estimated to be at about 787-billion-rand over the next three years.

He noted that South Africa wasn't financially poor and could "sail through the economic crisis" if there was better coordination of government resources and better leveraging of what government actually had.

Zimbabwe's Industry and Commerce Minister Welshman Ncube said that the country would look into the possibility of joining rand monetary union as an alternative to the country's existing multiple currency regime.

Namibia, Swaziland and Lesotho all use the South African rand alongside their own currencies.

Ncube didn't clarify if Zimbabwe planned to join rand monetary union before, or simultaneously, with bringing back the Zimbabwe dollar.

Zimbabwe has allowed the use of multiple foreign currencies since January to stem hyperinflation, which left the Zimbabwe dollar almost worthless in the midst of a severe economic crisis.

Also making headlines:

Southern African Customs Union trade negotiators head for talks in Namibia.
Fixed-line operator Neotel starts construction of its long distance fibre optics network.
South Africa completes the energy-efficiency retrofit of 4 000 State buildings.
And, Malaysia's Petronas and US company Noble Energy sign a Cameroon energy exploration deal.

That's a round up of news making headlines today. For more on these and other stories please visit engineeringnews.co.za.

To subscribe to Engineering News's print magazine email subscriptions@creamermedia.co.za or buy now.