For Africa’s development, what borrowed money costs matters as much as how much of it is available. That is why in this article I reflect on what the Africa Credit Rating Agency (AfCRA) could change for development finance, and what it will take to get there.
Three months ago in Abidjan, AfCRA was still a plan presented to African Ministers of Finance, Economic Development and Trade. This week in Port Louis, Mauritius, it becomes real. I am watching the launch from Bangkok, Thailand, where the IMF and World Bank meet next week to discuss the very questions this new agency wants to answer: how risky is Africa?
Many of the issues to be discussed in Bangkok, such as debt and how to attract private money for development, come back to one simple question: how risky is it to lend to Africa, and how much should Africa pay to borrow?
The launch of AfCRA is a real achievement. The African Union asked the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) to study the idea in 2017, and African leaders approved it in 2018. Since then, it has been discussed, redesigned and delayed many times. But creating an agency is one thing. Lowering the cost of borrowing for Africa is another. The first happens this week. The second depends on conditions that are still far from being met.
What ratings cost Africa
A credit rating is a grade that tells lenders how likely a borrower is to repay. It affects who can lend to a government or a company, and at what interest rate. Some investors, such as pension funds and insurance companies, are often only allowed to buy bonds that have a rating.
Africa faces two problems here. The first is that much of the continent is invisible to investors. 21 African countries have no credit rating at all. APRM says Africa’s financial markets are worth about $4 trillion, but less than 5% of them are rated. UNDP estimates that rating more companies and cities could unlock about $46 billion in business.
The second problem is that, where ratings do exist, African governments say they are often based more on perception than on facts. UNDP has estimated that this unfair part of ratings could cost African countries up to $74.5 billion, through higher interest payments and loans they never receive. Not everyone agrees with this number, and it is best seen as a maximum rather than an exact bill. But the concern behind it is real.
There is another cost, and it concerns the IMF and World Bank directly. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the G20 offered poor countries a pause on their debt payments. When some countries applied, including Ethiopia, Moody’s warned that it might lower their rating. Several other African countries chose not to apply at all. When asking for help leads to punishment by the markets, the system is not working properly.
What AfCRA is, and what it is not
AfCRA will not replace the three big global agencies, Moody’s, S&P and Fitch. It will work alongside them. It is a private company, owned by Africans and based in Mauritius. It is meant to pay for itself and to be independent. APRM helped to set it up and will now step back.
At first, AfCRA will rate governments, regional and city authorities, company bonds, banks and other financial institutions. It will pay special attention to debt in local African currencies. Later, it plans to rate insurance companies, large projects, Islamic finance, and to open regional offices.
AfCRA is also not Africa’s first rating agency. Some operate on the continent, including GCR, Agusto & Co and Bloomfield. What Africa lacks is an agency that covers the whole continent, rates governments, and is taken seriously by investors in London and New York as well as in Lagos and Nairobi. That is the gap AfCRA wants to fill.
AfCRA has been honest about its limits. It says that an African rating cannot replace better information from governments. That is the right message. A rating agency measures risk. It does not reduce it.
What AfCRA needs to succeed
At least 5 conditions will decide whether AfCRA becomes truly useful or is politely ignored by investors.
First, real independence. AfCRA was created by an African Union decision, and its first clients will mostly be African governments paying to be rated. The global agencies are also paid by those they rate, which creates a conflict of interest. AfCRA faces the same risk, plus a political one. It must show clearly that no president or minister can influence its decisions. That means independent board members, public rules on conflicts of interest, ratings that are never negotiated with governments, and open information about its fees.
Second, the courage to deliver bad news. AfCRA is right that timing and communication matter during a crisis. But if investors believe it delays bad news to protect a government, they will stop trusting it.
Third, a clear and open method. AfCRA says its method reflects African realities. To convince investors, it must publish exactly how it works: what data it uses and how much weight it gives to each factor. Over time, it should also publish studies showing how accurate its ratings turned out to be.
Fourth, better data from governments. This depends on governments, not on AfCRA. Hidden loans, guarantees kept off the budget, and unclear debts of state-owned companies have damaged Africa’s credit more than any foreign agency. AfCRA cannot rate what governments hide. Countries that want fairer ratings must publish all their debts, including loans backed by oil, minerals or other resources.
Fifth, official recognition. Ratings matter most when the rules require people to use them. If African central banks and market regulators officially accept AfCRA ratings, banks and investment funds at home will have to take them into account. Work on this is already under way with the Association of African Central Banks and the Africa Securities Exchanges Association. Recognition by regulators in Europe and the United States will take years and a proven record. It is a good goal, but not something to count on soon.
What the IMF and World Bank can do
The IMF and World Bank do not control AfCRA, and they should not try to. But they shape the system it works in, and they can take four practical steps.
They can help improve data. Their support to help countries report all their debts gives every rating agency, African or not, better information to work with.
They can use AfCRA ratings where it makes sense. The World Bank’s private sector arms, IFC and MIGA, and the regional development banks increasingly lend and offer guarantees in local currencies. If they consider AfCRA ratings alongside others, the agency will gain early users who expect high quality.
They can make room for it in their analysis. The IMF and World Bank are reviewing the tool they use to judge whether poor countries’ debts are sustainable. That review should explain clearly how ratings are used, and leave room for trusted regional ratings as a reference.
They can tackle the punishment problem. As long as countries fear a rating cut when they ask for debt relief, they will avoid tools like the G20 Common Framework. The IMF and World Bank can bring global and African rating agencies together to agree on how ratings should treat countries that seek official debt relief.
The Real Test
AfCRA has taken a long time to arrive, and its launch is worth celebrating. But its real test will not take place in Port Louis this week or in Bangkok next week. It will come slowly, over the next five years: each time an African pension fund decides whether to buy a city bond, and each time AfCRA has to tell a government something it does not want to hear.
As a policy advocacy and development professional, I take the general debate of the UN General Assembly (UNGA) and the statements leaders make there seriously, for practical reasons. These speeches set the tone for the year ahead. They shape the direction of the Assembly’s own work over the coming months, in its committees, its negotiations and the resolutions it adopts. They also carry into the other big moments on the calendar, from the financing talks at the IMF and World Bank to Security Council reform, the climate COP and the AU Summit and beyond. They show how countries and regions are shifting their positions, and they give advocates a roadmap at every level (national, regional, continental and global) of what governments have told the world they want and intend to do. They also give us a receipt. A promise made at the podium in New York can be checked back home: in the budget, in the mining contract, in how the police treat protesters. The gap between what leaders say at the UN and what they do in their capitals is where much of our advocacy work lives.
So why focus on Africa in this article? Because Africa’s statements barely made the international headlines. Reuters’ six big takeaways from UNGA week were led by Iran, then Ukraine, with AI, Venezuela and Sudan close behind. Those are fair editorial choices; wars command attention. But as Africa Briefing argued, the larger story was how closely the African interventions fitted together. Security Council seats, borrowing costs, mineral value chains, climate finance, reparations and AI governance all came back to one question: who writes the rules? That story deserves a fuller telling than a wire service roundup can give it.
General Assembly Hall
Before the session opened, I argued that it would test three things at once: whether power is really shifting, whether rights can survive being defunded, and whether multilateralism can still deliver. The general debate ran from 22 to 26 September and closed on 28 September. Every African delegation that wanted the podium has now had it. Here is what they said, what they avoided, and what it means for those of us who will hold them to it.
António Guterres set the tone in his last opening address as Secretary-General. He argued that the crises of the past decade are really one story about power: who has it, who is denied it, how it is used and how it is changing. African leaders picked up that thread and pulled hard.
One demand, many accents
Kenya’s William Ruto delivered the line of the session. Every nation has one vote in the Assembly, he said, yet five hold permanent power over war and peace that the other 188 do not. Africa’s 54 member states, more than a quarter of the membership, have no permanent seat: “Permanently discussed, yet permanently excluded.”
Nigeria’s statement, delivered by Vice President Kashim Shettima on President Tinubu’s behalf, demanded at least two permanent African seats with the veto for as long as it exists, plus five non-permanent seats.
Ethiopia’s President Taye Atske-Selassie renewed the call too, arguing that Africa has waited too long for equitable representation.
Senegal’s Bassirou Diomaye Faye said the time for observation had passed and the time for urgency and action had come, citing the Ezulwini Consensus, and announced Senegal’s bid for a non-permanent seat in 2032-2033. Even the Sahel confederation, which has broken with ECOWAS and much of the Western-led order, reaffirmed its support for Ezulwini and the Sirte Declaration.
South Africa’s Foreign Minister Ronald Lamola brought the number that should embarrass the Council most: over the past decade, 70% of Security Council resolutions have concerned conflicts on the African continent. We are the Council’s main business, and we have no permanent say in it.
None of this demand is new. What was new came from Sierra Leone’s Julius Maada Bio, who coordinates the AU’s Committee of Ten on reform. He said years of negotiations without results have tested the credibility of the process, and that member states should have a consolidated model before this session ends, as promised in the Pact for the Future. That is a deadline, and deadlines can be tracked. Bio also gave us the most useful sentence of the debate: “Representation becomes meaningful when it changes decisions and improves lives.”
Let’s be honest about the obstacles, though. Any change to permanent membership needs a Charter amendment ratified by two-thirds of member states, including all five permanent members. And the AU has still not decided which African countries would take the proposed seats, while Nigeria, Egypt and South Africa are all eyeing the role.
Money: the price of prejudice
Ruto noted that global public debt hit a record $102 trillion in 2024, and that 46 developing countries now spend more on interest than on classrooms and medicine. He argued that markets should charge for risk rather than prejudice, while also acknowledging that sound debt management and accountability at home are part of the answer.
Lamola framed the dilemma starkly. African governments, he said, must choose “whether to meet the needs of their citizens or satisfy the expectations of creditors.” In the last year alone, African countries spent roughly as much on debt service as it would take to close the continent’s infrastructure financing gap. South Africa backed a Borrowers’ Club to counterbalance creditors, along with more debt transparency and closer scrutiny of credit rating agencies.
Faye tied all of this to an anniversary I flagged in my first piece. Forty years after the Declaration on the Right to Development, he said, we know what is needed: deep reform of the financial architecture, sustainable debt treatment, fair global taxation, better access to concessional finance, and implementation of the Sevilla commitment and the Pact for the Future. He did not mention the draft covenant on the right to development, which has sat unadopted since 2023. That remains the missing piece.
Ghana’s Mahama linked climate to debt, arguing that countries with little responsibility for emissions should not have to borrow to recover from their effects, and calling for grants that do not create new debt.
Minerals: “process at home” becomes a continental refrain
The sharpest shift this year was on critical minerals. Leaders who agree on little else agreed here.
Sierra Leone’s Julius Maada Bio warned that the green transition must not reproduce the extractive terms of the past and called for processing at source and technology transfer. Mahama said Africa would not be a passive arena for a new scramble for resources, and Mnangagwa (Zimbabwe) argued that minerals should be beneficiated at source. Lamola reminded the Assembly that Africa holds the world’s largest reserves of critical minerals and insisted the continent must help write the rules on artificial intelligence.
Botswana’s Duma Boko made the same point about technology, saying developing countries need a real voice in setting the standards and safeguards for emerging technologies. Even the Sahel states promised more local transformation of their raw materials.
The strongest intervention came from the country where minerals and war are the same story. The DRC’s Prime Minister Judith Suminwa said: “We cannot build a decarbonized economy through blood-stained minerals.” She added that the DRC no longer wants to be “the basement of the world’s economy”, and rejects a model in which producer countries dig while processing, research and profits happen elsewhere.
I welcome the unity. I am less sure about the follow-through. Processing minerals competitively requires reliable electricity, transport, skilled labor, stable regulation and a great deal of capital. It is also a governance question: who gets the contracts, who sees the revenue, and whether mining communities and civil society can scrutinize either. Leverage without accountability just moves the extraction into new hands.
Conflicts, wars.
Africa’s conflicts were on the record, sometimes from both sides of the same war. Rwanda and the DRC gave the Assembly opposing accounts of the fighting in eastern DRC, where Rwanda-backed M23 fighters have seized Goma and Bukavu, though both stressed the need for progress towards peace. Suminwa’s message was about enforcement, not new diplomacy. Resolution 2773 already lays out the path, she said, including a cessation of hostilities and the withdrawal of Rwandan forces; what is missing is implementation.
On the Sahel, Diomaye Faye spoke as ECOWAS chair. Terrorism is cross-border by nature, he said, and must be fought together: “The Sahel must not be abandoned to its sad fate.” On the final day, the three states that left ECOWAS answered in their own voice.
Burkina Faso’s foreign minister Karamoko Jean Marie Traoré spoke for the Sahel confederation on behalf of Captain Ibrahim Traoré, General Assimi Goïta and General Abdourahamane Tiani, a single statement for three governments. The joint statement accused unnamed states of backing the terrorists, arguing that the weapons and supply chains used in recent attacks in Mali and Niger do not come from nowhere, and called silence in the face of such support complicity. Mali would name one of those states hours later. Traoré also claimed that Burkina Faso now controls more than 74% of its territory, a figure that comes from the government itself.
Mali named Ukraine
On the final day, Mali went further than the joint statement. Speaking for General Assimi Goïta, Foreign Minister Abdoulaye Diop called the violence in Mali a hybrid proxy war and publicly accused Kyiv of giving clear and open support to the terrorist groups operating in the Sahel. He then widened the charge, calling Ukraine only “the visible part of the iceberg” of a larger destabilization effort by powers he described as nostalgic for a colonial past (This obviously refers to France without naming it). He pointed to the coordinated attacks of 25 April and 4 July 2026 as proof of a dangerous connection, and said the 2012 scenario was repeating itself, with terrorist groups and self-described separatists fighting in open coalition. He also traced the region’s crisis back to NATO’s 2011 intervention in Libya, and his message to outside powers was direct: “We have no orders to take.”
This did not come from nowhere. In 2024, after the Tinzaouatène ambush that killed Malian soldiers and Wagner fighters, a spokesman for Ukraine’s military intelligence told Ukrainian television that the armed groups had received “all the necessary information they needed” from Kyiv. Mali cut diplomatic ties within days. Ukraine has consistently and categorically rejected the charge, calling it a Russian propaganda narrative.
This is one of the most serious accusations made at the podium this session, and it deserves to be treated seriously, which means investigated rather than simply asserted or dismissed. If any state is arming or guiding groups that kill Malian soldiers and civilians, that is a grave breach of international law, and it should be proven and punished.
There is a way to settle it. The Sahel joint statement itself asked the world to look at the facts and investigate seriously. Mali should take that request to its logical end and invite an independent UN-mandated inquiry into foreign support for armed groups in the Sahel, open to scrutiny of all outside actors, including Mali’s own Russian partners. That step would carry far more weight than an iceberg metaphor. It also shows the cost of walking out of the ICC: the governments now asking the world to investigate foreign crimes on their soil have just left the one permanent court designed to do it.
The iceberg image has a second edge. It shifts attention away from what Mali’s own security partnership has not delivered. Kidal changed hands again this year, the defence minister was killed in the April attacks, and the jihadist coalition has struck close to Bamako. Foreign meddling may well be part of the story. It cannot be the whole of it.
Sudan, Ethiopia and Gaza
Lamola called Sudan the worst humanitarian crisis in the world, and he is right. Yet Sudan’s head of state never reached the podium. The United States withheld a visa for army leader Abdel Fattah al-Burhan, and Reuters sources reported that it appeared to be conditioned on his accepting a 90-day ceasefire proposed by US adviser Massad Boulos. Guterres’s spokesman said the Secretary-General was deeply concerned and had raised it with US authorities. I have no sympathy for a general whose forces stand accused of grave abuses. But a host country using entry visas as leverage sets a precedent no African government should accept. The Headquarters Agreement exists so that access to the UN does not depend on Washington’s approval.
Ethiopia offered a different kind of silence. President Taye used his address to argue that Ethiopia cannot sustain its development without reliable access to the sea, framed as a regional project rather than a national one. The day before, Guterres had said he was gravely concerned by the rapidly deteriorating situation in northern Ethiopia, including the seizure of the Mekelle, Axum and Shire airports and intensified fighting in and around Tigray. In the coverage of Taye’s speech that I reviewed, Tigray does not appear. When the Secretary-General is warning of a wider war inside your country, the podium is the place to address it.
On Gaza, Mahama accused the international community of hiding behind diplomatic euphemisms while also condemning Hamas’s acts of terrorism. South Africa said Israel’s violations constitute genocide. Nigeria went the other way: its national statement focused on terrorism and insecurity and did not mention Palestine. Africa’s unity has limits.
Who wasn’t in the room
Nigeria’s president sent his deputy. Cyril Ramaphosa did not deliver South Africa’s general debate address, contributing through a pre-recorded message to an inequality event instead. Félix Tshisekedi skipped the week altogether. Sudan’s leader was kept out. None of the three Sahel leaders came.
What was missing, and what was worse than missing
In my first piece, I called the xenophobic attacks on African migrants in South Africa a shame, all the more so because South Africa hosted the original Durban conference. So I read Lamola’s Durban passage closely. He reaffirmed South Africa’s commitment to confronting racism and xenophobia through its Constitution and institutions, then pivoted to calling irregular migration a shared responsibility of all countries. That is a policy line. It is not an answer to Africans being chased from their homes and businesses on African soil. The only leader I found who named the problem head-on was Mahama, who warned that when belonging is weaponized for political expediency it becomes nativism, chauvinism and xenophobia.
The Sahel statement went in the opposite direction, and it deserves to be read carefully. The three juntas confirmed that they have formally notified their withdrawal from the Rome Statute, citing selectivity and politicization. Their slogan: “International justice, yes; variable-geometry justice, no.” They described human rights scrutiny of their emergency measures as partial and selective, said they accept impartial review but reject “political trials”, and attacked the European Parliament for its resolutions on the Sahel. They also argued that the first human right is the right to life.
Some speeches did turn the mirror inward. Mahama told fellow leaders to put their own houses in order: “Whoever comes into equity must come with clean hands.” Lamola called for protecting international justice institutions from sanctions and intimidation, a welcome line while the ICC is under attack.
Ruto made the same point about international law being invoked loudly in one crisis and ignored in another. But leaving the only permanent international criminal court is not a cure for selective justice. It guarantees no justice at all for victims in the Sahel, including victims of abuses by state forces and allied militias. The answer to a court that is too weak on the powerful is a stronger court, not an exit. The same statement that demanded an end to double standards asked the world to trust governments that no longer allow independent international scrutiny. Africans deserve better than that trade.
Across the addresses I reviewed, the shrinking space for journalists, activists and opposition voices on our own continent barely featured. We can’t credibly demand a fairer global order while tolerating unfairness at home.
What I’ll be watching
Bio’s deadline for a consolidated reform model before this session ends, and whether the AU finally agrees on who would take Africa’s seats. Whether the Borrowers’ Club gets real members and rules, starting at the IMF and World Bank Annual Meetings in Bangkok next month. Whether “process at home” produces mining contracts that citizens can actually see. Whether the Sahel states’ ICC exit is matched by credible national accountability, or simply by less of it, and whether Mali’s accusations are ever put before an independent inquiry. And whether Ghana’s AU chairmanship in 2027 turns this week’s words into a continental strategy.
Africa has been permanently discussed for eighty years. This week it spoke up, loudly and with unusual coherence. The next twelve months will show whether anyone was listening, and whether we were listening to ourselves.
Every year, African leaders travel to foreign capitals to discuss the continent’s future. But who sets the agenda before they arrive, and what do the pledges bring home?
In this article for The Africa Report, published last year, my colleague Ruth Omondi and I argue that Africa needs to gather on its own terms: agree on shared priorities, bargain together, and turn its minerals, markets and talent into lasting value for its people. Partnerships matter. The direction must come from Africa.
Cameras capture smiles, handshakes and declarations of “renewed cooperation”, but behind the photos and joint communiqués lies a sobering question: Why does Africa continue to gather abroad, in foreign capitals, to discuss its own future?
At TICAD 9 in Yokohama this year, a large number of African heads of state were once again in attendance. The pledges that followed echoed decades-old patterns: $5.5bn in Japanese loans, a proposed Indian Ocean-Africa economic zone, and training for 30,000 Artificial Intelligence experts over three years.
These initiatives are not unwelcome. Roads, ports and training programmes are useful. What remains missing is a clear strategy for structural transformation.
Why Always Abroad?
African leaders appear repeatedly as recipients of foreign benevolence rather than as architects of their own collective vision.
The symbolism is striking: an entire continent’s leadership leaving home to seek validation abroad. If partnership always requires Africa to appear on someone else’s lawn, then it becomes less about equality and more about ritualised dependence.
It does not have to be this way. African summits are occasionally hosted on the continent itself. Yet time and again, leaders choose to fly across continents – more than 50 planes to Japan, France, the US or Italy – just to meet one foreign leader.
Why not instead extend the African Union (AU) Summit in Addis Ababa by a few days, when every leader is already gathered, and handle external partnerships there?
Ignoring Africa’s Own Rules
The irony is that Africa already agreed on this. In 2020, the AU Assembly adopted Decision 762 (XXXIII), which stated that external partnership meetings should be attended only by a streamlined delegation: the AU Bureau, Regional Economic Communities (REC) chairpersons, African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) leadership and the AU Commission chairperson.
This was meant to protect dignity, reduce costs and project unity. Preparations would remain inclusive, but not every head of state would be required to travel.
Yet the decision has been consistently ignored. Leaders still turn up in Tokyo, Washington and Beijing – often with greater commitment than they show to the AU Summit itself. Principle gives way to photo opportunities. The result is fragmentation and weakened credibility.
The Illusion of Progress
The hard truth is this: at these summits, too many African leaders appear more concerned with scrambling for piecemeal funding – a new hospital here, scholarships for a few hundred students there – than with advancing transformational, continent-wide projects envisioned in Agenda 2063.
Instead of negotiating for cross-border infrastructure corridors, industrial zones, energy grids or digital integration – initiatives that could truly shift Africa’s position in the global economy – leaders too often settle for petty pledges that make good headlines at home but do little to change Africa’s structural dependence.
This approach is short-sighted and costly. It fragments Africa’s bargaining power, undermines the credibility of blueprints like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and leaves the continent speaking with 55 competing voices rather than one.
If African leaders redirected their energy toward major collective initiatives such as continental transport corridors, green industrial parks, regional universities of excellence, and Africa-wide energy interconnections, they would not only better align with Agenda 2063, but they would also negotiate from a position of unity and strength.
The choice is stark: continue competing for petty, fragmented projects, or rise to the challenge of building the pan-African infrastructure of sovereignty that future generations demand.
The Missing African Conference
Meanwhile, the world is shifting rapidly. Old alliances are breaking apart. New power blocs are emerging. Critical minerals, digital governance and green industrial policy are reshaping economies. Still, Africa has not convened a single continental summit to define its collective stance.
Leaders rush to Tokyo, Beijing, Paris and Washington, but not to an African-owned conference to deliberate Africa’s place in this new world order. This tragedy is not due to a lack of resources or talent. Africa has all three: youth, markets and minerals. What it lacks is unity of purpose.
Time to Regroup
The moment to regroup is now. African leaders must stop outsourcing the continent’s future and instead harness Africa’s resources collectively, from minerals to markets and agriculture. They must develop common strategies to add value locally, refining minerals, producing green energy, and building digital industries.
They must negotiate as a bloc, not as fragmented supplicants. They must also strengthen South-South cooperation with Latin America, Asia and the Caribbean to shift away from a donor-recipient model. Most importantly, they must place youth and citizens at the centre of decision-making, rather than chasing symbolic photo opportunities.
Reclaiming the AU mandate is essential. The 2020 decision to limit foreign summit attendance to rotating representatives must be enforced. Africa must also urgently hold its own geopolitical summit in Addis Ababa, or any African capital, to deliberate on its role in the shifting world order.
Leaders must shift from symbolism to substance by demanding enforceable deals abroad, not vague pledges. They must prioritise intra-African diplomacy, strengthening cooperation among governments, civil society and the private sector.
Above all, they must think generationally, not politically, making decisions that serve Africa’s future rather than short-term optics.
Until African leaders sit together on African soil to define their collective agenda, every foreign summit will serve as a reminder that the continent’s destiny is still being negotiated elsewhere.
Africa must stop outsourcing its future!
Désiré Assogbavi is Advocacy Advisor at the Open Society Foundations while Ruth Omondi is Associate Director of Communications at the Open Society Foundations. This Op-Ed article was originally published on the Africa Report.
World leaders arrive in New York next week for the high-level debate of the 81st General Assembly, under the theme “Restoring trust, managing transformation: a United Nations that delivers for all”. It is an honest choice of words. Trust is exactly what is missing, and the transformation is happening whether the UN manages it or not. Power is moving to states that sit outside the Security Council, the machinery that protects human rights is being defunded and openly attacked, and the organisation itself is running on less money than at any point in recent memory.
The session opened on 8 September under the presidency of Khalilur Rahman, Bangladesh’s foreign minister, whose priorities include peace and security, human rights, the governance of new technologies such as AI, and UN reform. When the general debate opens on 22 September, three questions will sit behind almost every speech. Do the rules of the UN Charter still bind the powerful? Who is going to pay for the institutions meant to uphold them? And what becomes of human rights while both answers remain unclear?
Rules that no longer bind
This year 2026 opened with a shock. On 3 January, US forces struck targets around Caracas and took Venezuela’s sitting president, Nicolás Maduro, out of the country to face trial in New York. Chatham House described the operation as a clear breach of Venezuelan sovereignty and of the Charter, and the Secretary-General said the rules of international law had not been respected. At the end of February, after talks mediated by Oman broke down, the United States and Israel launched strikes on Iran. A Pakistan-brokered pause in April and a US-Iran memorandum in June did not hold.
In both cases the Security Council, where Washington holds a veto, has been largely a spectator. The governments that have kept a line open between Washington and Tehran are Pakistan, Qatar and Oman, none of which holds a permanent seat. That tells us a lot about where diplomatic weight is moving.
The numbers confirm the trend. According to the Uppsala Conflict Data Program, 2025 saw 65 armed conflicts involving states, the highest count since 1946, including eight between states. Around 244,600 people died in organised violence, and attacks on civilians in Sudan drove one-sided violence to a thirty-year high. Governments responded by arming. SIPRI puts global military spending at $2,887 billion in 2025, the eleventh consecutive annual rise, equal to 2.5% of world GDP.
A UN asked to do more with far less
The money story is just as stark. Under the UN80 initiative, the 2026 regular budget was cut by about 15 percent and thousands of posts are going. Even so, the UN closed 2025 with a record $1.6 billion in unpaid assessed contributions.
Washington has gone further than withholding cash. A White House memorandum in January pulled the United States out of 66 international bodies, 31 of them UN entities. Across the donor world, official development assistance from OECD-DAC members fell 23.1% in real terms in 2025, the largest drop on record, and core contributions to the UN system fell 27%.
Seen from Africa
For Africa, these trends arrive together. The OECD expects bilateral aid to sub-Saharan Africa to fall by another 11.6% in 2026, on top of last year’s cuts. Debt service is already squeezing budgets: UNCTAD counts 3.4 billion people worldwide living in countries that spend more on interest than on health or education, and a large share of those countries are African.
Africa is not only on the receiving end, though. The UN Tax Convention talks, which held their third session in Nairobi, have now moved to actual treaty drafting, with a text due before the 82nd General Assembly. For a continent that loses heavily to tax avoidance and profit shifting, this is one of the most important negotiations in the UN system right now.
The contrast with the G20 is hard to miss. The United States, which holds this year’s presidency, has barred South Africa from the Miami summit, the first time a member has been shut out of the group. Meanwhile, the scramble for the minerals behind the energy transition is intensifying. When we brought governments, researchers and civil society together in Accra in July this year to discuss governance, critical minerals and conflict, the central question was whether African states will negotiate those resources on their own terms, or repeat a history in which the wealth left and the conflict stayed.
Then there is representation. Africa has 54 UN member states and still no permanent seat on the Security Council, nearly two decades after the African Union set out its position in the Ezulwini Consensus.
The future of human rights
Of all the issues on the table this month, the future of human rights deserves the most attention. The international human rights system is being weakened from three directions at once.
The first is money. In 2024 the UN human rights office received $170 million from the regular budget, just 4.7 percent of the total, and human rights work accounted for under one percent of the UN system’s $68.3 billion income. Cuts to that thin base have already halved the office’s field missions, from 11,000 in 2024 to 5,000 in 2025. Many of the inquiries that member states set up to investigate atrocities in Sudan, the DRC, Ukraine, Syria and Israel/Palestine are working with 40 to 60 percent of their planned staff. The commission on eastern Congo, created in February 2025, hired its first people only in June this year.
The second is coercion. Since February 2025, a US executive order has been used to sanction International Criminal Court (ICC) officials. The list now includes the court’s president, Tomoko Akane, and a senior trial lawyer from Senegal, Abdoulaye Seye, both designated on 18 August. Judges under sanction report frozen accounts and lost access to basic financial services. Open Society is contesting this in court. In August, the Open Society Foundations joined the American Friends Service Committee, Human Rights Watch, and the Center for Constitutional Rights in challenging the constitutionality and legality of Executive Order 14203, which authorized sanctions on ICC officials and others who work to prevent, investigate, and punish war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide.
The third is the shrinking of civic space.The CIVICUS Monitor now rates 83 countries as repressed or closed, and only 7.2 percent of humanity lives where civic freedoms are broadly respected. Sudan has fallen into the closed category. The United States itself has been downgraded to obstructed.
None of this means human rights have no future. It means the future will look different. Some of the most important legal action of recent years has come from African states. The Gambia took Myanmar to the International Court of Justice over genocide, and South Africa brought its own case against Israel. South Africa is also part of the Hague Group, a coalition of Global South governments seeking to make international law apply to everyone. These initiatives show that the defence of universal rights is no longer led mainly by Western capitals, and in several cases is now led against their positions.
The Declaration adopted in 1986 said something many governments still find uncomfortable: that development is a right, that people must be able to take part in the decisions that shape their lives, and that economic resources should be shared equitably. Four decades later, the legal follow-through is stuck. The intergovernmental working group finished negotiating a draft international covenant on the right to development in July 2023 and recommended that the Human Rights Council send it to the General Assembly, with a conference convened to adopt it. The text has been sitting with the Assembly ever since. Last October the UN’s Expert Mechanism on the Right to Development urged member states again to adopt it and to carry out human rights impact assessments of their cooperation policies. Nothing has moved.
The 23 September meeting should therefore produce more than tributes. It should set a timetable for the Assembly to take up the draft covenant, through an intergovernmental conference or another negotiating track. It should connect the right to development to the decisions that actually determine it today, which means debt restructuring, the Tax Convention and the collapse in aid. African states, which have defended this right since the 1980s and have the most to gain from it, should lead that push rather than wait for others to schedule it.
The second anniversary is harder to mark honestly, because the trend is going backwards…
The worst of it this year has been in South Africa. Since late May, African foreign nationals have been beaten, their homes and shops burned and several killed, while vigilante groups set a June deadline for undocumented African migrants to get out. Thousands fled. Malawians camped in the open through winter in Durban, Zimbabweans queued outside their consulate in Cape Town, and Nigeria, Ghana, Mozambique and Malawi organized flights and buses to bring citizens home. There is no polite way to say what this means. The country that hosted the World Conference against Racism, whose own freedom was won against a system built on racial classification, has become the most visible source of xenophobic violence on the continent. And the government’s response has been far weaker than the moment demands. Courts have ruled, ministers have condemned, and the attacks have carried on. What is missing is enforcement, prosecution of those who organise the violence, and political leaders who stop borrowing the language of the mobs as elections approach.
The pattern is wider than South Africa. Algeria keeps expelling migrants of various African nationalities, children among them, into the desert at the Niger border. Libya’s eastern authorities announced a new expulsion campaign in June, and Morocco began large-scale deportations of sub-Saharan Africans in April, much of it encouraged and financed through Europe’s border deals. Elsewhere the discrimination is administrative. Tanzania has barred non-citizens from around fifteen categories of small business, Kenya ordered the closure this month of small businesses run by foreigners without permits, and Gabon has tightened the rules on employing foreign workers.
This is where I need to be blunt. A continent that asks the world for reparatory justice, that defeated apartheid, and that has just entered the Second International Decade for People of African Descent cannot at the same time treat Africans as foreigners in Africa. Our own commitments say so and we ignore them: the African Union Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, adopted in 2018, has been ratified by only 4 countries, Mali, Niger, Rwanda and São Tomé and Príncipe, and needs 15 to enter into force. Changing course does not require new declarations. It requires governments to enforce the rulings their own courts have issued, to prosecute incitement instead of tolerating vigilantes, to end collective expulsions into the desert, and to stop taking foreign money to do at their borders what they would call racism if it were done to their citizens abroad. 25 years after Durban, the test is no longer whether we can name racism and xenophobia when others practice them. It is whether we will name them when the perpetrators look like us.
Artificial intelligence: the next frontier for rights
Artificial intelligence is the next front. The UN now has an Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, 40 experts. It released its first report on 1 July, before the first Global Dialogue on AI Governance in Geneva; the next dialogue will be in New York in May 2027. Facial recognition, automated welfare and policing decisions, and large-scale disinformation already affect people’s rights today. If the countries most exposed to these tools have no real say in how they are governed, the rules will be written for them and not with them.
What makes this session different
UNGA sessions often blur together. This one should not. US disengagement is now written into policy. Permanent members of the Council have themselves been party to uses of force widely seen as unlawful. Mediation is increasingly led by countries outside the P5. AI has a standing place on the UN agenda for the first time. And every statement made this month will be read with an eye on who runs the organisation from January 2027.
What we are asking for
At Open Society, we believe the answer to a damaged international order is a fairer multilateralism, built with the Global South rather than on its behalf, and anchored in human rights. Our engagement this session is organized around three themes: the future of multilateralism, the future of human rights and the centering of human dignity, and the war on Iran with everything that follows from it. Our Vice President of Programs, Pedro Abramovay, has set out that wider vision this week.
For this session, I would want us to land on the following:
The future of multilateralism
Pay the dues, and measure reform by what the UN delivers. Assessed contributions should be paid in full and on time, the largest contributors first. UN80 should be judged on capacity to act, not on how much it cuts, and member states should protect mandates that no one else performs, starting with investigations, mediation and human rights monitoring.
Share power, not just costs. Africa has 54 member states and no permanent seat. Security Council reform along the lines of the Ezulwini Consensus deserves a real negotiation with a timetable, and the same principle of fair representation should apply to the governance of the international financial institutions.
Finish the financial agenda the Global South started. Conclude and adopt the UN Tax Convention on schedule, move debt restructuring into a forum where debtor countries have a voice, and treat the collapse in concessional finance as a systemic risk rather than a budget line.
Choose the next Secretary-General in the open. Publish more about how the Council reaches its recommendation, hold dialogues with candidates in the regions most affected by UN decisions rather than only in New York, and let African institutions question those who would lead the organisation. After 8 decades and 9 men, the case for a woman is overdue.
Govern AI with rights at the centre. Protect the independence of the Scientific Panel, fund participation from countries that cannot easily afford it, and ensure the Global Dialogue produces standards anchored in human rights law rather than voluntary principles written by those who build the systems.
The future of human rights and human dignity
Human rights funding. Human rights costs the UN system under 1% of its income. Member states should shield that share from further cuts, staff the inquiries they have already mandated, and give the human rights office multi-year, flexible funding so its work does not depend on the political mood of a handful of donors.
Defend international justice out loud. Governments that support the International Criminal Court should say so publicly, press for the sanctions on its officials to be lifted, adopt protective measures so that banks and service providers do not enforce them by default, and continue cooperating with the court in every situation, not only the convenient ones.
Put the Right to Development back on a legal track. Set a timetable for the General Assembly to take up the draft covenant finalised in 2023, and start applying the right in practice through human rights impact assessments of debt, trade and aid decisions.
Turn the Durban anniversary into a change of trajectory. African governments should enforce their own court rulings against xenophobic violence, prosecute those who organise it, end collective expulsions, and ratify the AU Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, which still has four ratifications out of the fifteen it needs. The African Union should be willing to name and challenge member states that let this happen, and the Second International Decade for People of African Descent should come with funded national action plans rather than communiqués.
Protect civic space and the people who use it. Judge every reform, including UN80, by whether it widens or narrows civil society’s access to the UN. Support the coalitions of Global South states now using courts and legal mechanisms to hold the powerful to the same standards, and fund the defenders and journalists who document abuses when official monitoring is being cut.
The war on Iran, its consequences and what comes next
Back the mediators and rebuild a negotiated track. The channels that have worked run through Oman, Qatar and Pakistan. Member states should support them politically and financially, and the UN should aim to be a guarantor of whatever framework emerges rather than an observer of it.
Restate the rule on the use of force, plainly. The General Assembly should reaffirm that the Charter prohibits the threat or use of force against another state, and reject the idea that preventive strikes or the seizure of a head of state can be normalised. Small and middle-sized states have the most to lose if that principle quietly lapses, which is why they should lead this.
Put civilians first in the consequences. That means humanitarian access, protection for people displaced by the war, sanctions designed so that they do not deprive civilians of medicine and food, and continued international inspection arrangements to reduce nuclear and radiological risk.
Apply one standard. Violations should be documented and investigated whoever commits them, in Iran as in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine and Venezuela. Selective outrage is the fastest way to finish off what remains of the rules, and the Global South has been saying so for years.
Track the fallout in places nobody is discussing. Energy and food prices move quickly when the Gulf is unstable, and import-dependent African economies absorb the shock with no fiscal room left after debt service. The Assembly should keep those effects on the record rather than treating this as a regional security file.
After the speeches
The Secretary-General reminded member states this summer that the UN Charter opens with “We, the peoples“, not “We the powerful“, not “We the victorious.” It is a useful test for the coming weeks.
Speeches cost nothing. UNGA81 will be judged on things that deliver. Some of the states that wrote the rules now treat them as optional. We can’t afford that luxury, and neither can anyone who depends on the UN to document abuses, protect civilians or hold a ceasefire together. The answer to a damaged system is not less multilateralism. It is a fairer one: paid for, shared, and answerable to the peoples the Charter names first.
Follow this space for my post-UNGA81 analysis, when we will know whether any of this moved.
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DAKAR/RIO DE JANEIRO – For five centuries, raw materials have flowed out of Africa and Brazil at low cost to be used as inputs elsewhere-often returning to their source countries embedded in expensive finished goods. The energy transition offers a critical opportunity to escape this extractive dynamic. The key for these economies is to leverage their vast resources, as well as mutual cooperation, to build thriving green industries of their own.
The current global energy crisis has made the energy transition all the more urgent. Supply disruptions and rising costs have put pressure on governments, households, and businesses in many countries, weakening productivity, straining food supplies, and exacerbating economic inequality.
The effects of the crisis are particularly acute in many African countries, which already struggle with persistent poverty, limited energy access, and inadequate infrastructure. Africa’s energy-producing countries are not immune, not least because they often export crude oil while importing costlier refined products like diesel and gasoline.
But the problem runs far deeper than the current crisis. As a recent Oil Change International report shows, decades of extraction have produced income concentration, economic dependency, external vulnerabilities, and the weakening of other productive sectors.
Achieving broad-based development requires a new approach, one which leverages South-South cooperation to advance green development and sustainable industrialization. Brazil and African countries, such as Kenya, Namibia, South Africa, and Tunisia, are particularly well-suited to spearhead such a strategy, acting not only as diplomatic partners, but as co-producers of a green industrial transformation.
Since returning to the presidency in 2023, Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has emphasized the importance of South-South cooperation, not least to advance the climate and development agenda. Moreover, he has resumed official visits to African countries, such as Mozambique and South Africa, whose leaders have reciprocated with visits to Brazil. Such diplomatic initiatives have been matched by concrete cooperation in agriculture, health, education, defense, energy, and other areas. But it is in green industry that this partnership can take on real strategic significance.
Brazil and Africa have important comparative advantages in two sectors that are central to the global energy transition. The first is critical minerals. African countries have significant reserves of cobalt, graphite, lithium, and manganese—critical inputs in batteries, electric vehicles, and renewable-energy technologies. Brazil also has reserves of graphite and lithium, as well as nickel and rare-earth elements.
The United Nations reports that trade in raw and semi-processed critical minerals reached roughly $2.5 trillion in 2023, accounting for more than 10% of global trade. That total is projected to triple by 2030. According to the International Energy Agency’s Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2025, lithium demand alone could grow fivefold by 2040, while cobalt and rare-earth demand might rise 50-60%.
If Brazil and Africa focus on meeting this exploding demand with raw exports, they will find themselves ensnared by the same old extractive trap. But by building shared production chains and pursuing technology-transfer agreements, joint research, and industrial policies focused on adding value locally, they can finally translate their resource wealth into sustained growth and development.
Africa and Brazil also stand to benefit from some of the best conditions in the world for solar- and wind-power generation. Already, decentralized solar-power installations are proliferating in many African countries, expanding access to electricity in rural areas and urban peripheries. In many cases, this is a bottom-up energy transition, with families and small businesses purchasing and installing solar panels, often using pay-as-you-go solutions.
Brazil, for its part, is a global leader in biofuels and hydropower technologies. According to the IEA, the country contributes almost 7% of the world’s renewable-energy production, despite accounting for only 3% of its population and 2% of its GDP. And Brazil continues to invest heavily in expanding and “greening” energy access. The Amazon Energy Program aims to replace diesel-based power generation in the Isolated Systems of the Legal Amazon with clean, renewable energy sources.
Cooperation on renewable energy can help Africa and Brazil alike. Brazil can contribute its technical and institutional capacities. Its Luz para Todos program, which has connected more than 17 million rural Brazilians to electricity since 2003, is precisely the kind of initiative that can be adapted to African contexts. African countries, for their part, can share the innovative solutions they have developed for expanding energy access, including pay-as-you-go solar home systems and micro-generation of energy.
But installing renewable-energy infrastructure alone will not deliver green development. That requires countries to increase their productive capacity, enhance their technological capabilities, and train and employ skilled workforces. A green industrial transformation must generate jobs-the third critical area for cooperation.
The International Renewable Energy Agency projects that the energy transition could create millions of jobs in Africa by 2030, especially in solar energy, electrical infrastructure, and green manufacturing. The same applies to Brazil, which seeks to shift its industry toward sectors linked to the low-carbon economy.
But major roadblocks remain-none greater than finance. This is particularly true for Africa, which, despite holding 60% of the world’s best solar resources, receives only about 3% of global energy investment and 2% of clean-energy investment. African countries also face extremely high borrowing costs. Alternative cooperation mechanisms and joint South-South financing initiatives, as well as increased support from development banks and greater private-sector participation, are needed to advance green industrialization.
For too long, Africa and Latin America have served as mere suppliers of raw commodities, preventing them from achieving broad-based prosperity. By working together, however, developing economies can transform their strategic resources into the industrial, technological, and political capacity they need to build robust, dynamic, and sustainable economies.
Renata Albuquerque Ribeiro is a postdoctoral researcher at the Industry and Competitiveness Group at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro.
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On 4 September, the UN General Assembly adopted a text that some years ago most people outside that room would have dismissed as decoration. Resolution A/80/L.104, “Correct the map: rebalancing global cartographic representation and promoting equitable representation of the world’s regions, particularly Africa,” passed by 164 votes to one, with six abstentions. Togo introduced it on behalf of the African Group. The United States voted against, calling it ideological. Estonia, Georgia, Lithuania, Moldova, Serbia and Ukraine abstained. Everybody else said yes.
The resolution encourages governments, schools, publishers, international organizations and technology companies to move away from the Mercator projection and toward equal-area projections such as Equal Earth wherever the comparative size of continents actually matters. It is not binding. It redraws no borders, alters no maritime zone, and takes nothing away from anybody. Within hours, France announced it would drop Mercator from its official representations.
Predictably, some online arguments started before the applause finished. Cosmetic. A distraction. Africa has real problems and this isn’t one of them. I understand the impatience, but I think the critics have the wrong end of it.
Gerardus Mercator drew his projection in 1569 to help sailors hold a constant bearing across an ocean. For that, it remains excellent. The problem is what happened afterwards: a navigation tool became the default picture of the world, hung on classroom walls, printed in textbooks, embedded in news graphics and, later, coded into the mapping applications most of us carry in our pockets. And because it stretches landmasses the further you move from the equator, it does something quietly consequential. It shrinks the tropics. Africa covers about 30 million square kilometres, enough to hold the United States, China, India and most of Europe inside its outline with room to spare. On a Mercator map it looks roughly the size of Greenland, which is about fourteen times smaller.
I learned geography from that map. So did the people who now run our ministries, and the people who write about us from other capitals. Not one of us questioned it at the time. That is the whole argument. A distortion you are taught before you are old enough to interrogate it doesn’t register as a distortion at all. It registers as the world. Perception hardens into assumption, assumption into expectation, and expectation into how a continent gets treated in a boardroom, an editorial meeting or a donor conference. Fixing that is not decoration. It is a correction to the mental furniture of several billion people, and it cost nothing but organization.
Which brings me to the part of this story I find more interesting than the map.
Twice in 6 months
This was not a one-off. On 25 March, in the same hall, the General Assembly adopted resolution A/80/L.48, declaring the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Africans and racialized chattel enslavement the gravest crime against humanity, and opening the door to a conversation about reparatory justice. Ghana carried that one, on behalf of the African Group, with the African Union and CARICOM behind it. President Mahama had given notice of the intention from the same rostrum six months earlier and then spent the interval building the coalition. It passed 123 to 3, with 52 abstentions.
Look at those two vote counts side by side, because they teach something.
The map resolution asked the world to change how it sees. It cost nothing, and it got 164 votes. The slavery resolution asked the world to accept a legal and moral characterisation with financial consequences attached. It got 123, and the entire European Union, plus Canada, Australia and Japan, sat on its hands. The lesson is not that one succeeded and the other didn’t. Both passed. The lesson is that the harder the ask, the more the outcome depends on how tightly Africa holds together, and the less anyone else’s goodwill will carry us.
What both votes had in common was method. One member state carried a mandate that belonged to all 54. The African Union Commission worked the ground beforehand. There was a single clear ask rather than a wish list. There were months of quiet consultation with jurists, scholars and other regional groups before anything reached the floor. And in the room, nobody broke ranks. That is not luck. That is craft, and we now have two demonstrations of it inside one year.
So the question I keep coming back to is not whether the map matters. It’s this: why do we only assemble that machine when the adversary is external?
The same technique, should be turned inward
Consider what we are carrying while we celebrate.
Africa now accounts for around 43 per cent of the world’s forcibly displaced people, roughly 45.7 million, and 96 per cent of them come from countries at war. In 2025 alone, conflict displaced 9.7 million people in the DRC, the highest figure that country has ever recorded and close to a third of the global total. Sudan remained the world’s largest internal displacement crisis for a third consecutive year with 9.1 million people uprooted, 62% of them in Darfur. Sub-Saharan Africa absorbed 14.5 million conflict displacements, about 45 per cent of the world’s total. The African Union’s “Silencing the Guns” Campaign was supposed to be done by 2020. It was rolled over to 2030. On present evidence it will be rolled over again unless something changes in how we approach it.
Now consider the resource question. The continent holds roughly 30 per cent of global reserves of the minerals the energy transition runs on. We produce more than 77% of the world’s cobalt, 83% of platinum group metals, 65% of manganese, and by 2030 we are projected to supply about 60% of global lithium and 40% of graphite. Africa’s share of participation in the global value chains built on those minerals sits at about 2%. Zimbabwe holds the continent’s largest lithium reserves and exports concentrate at around $10,000 a ton into a market where the refined material sells for roughly $40,000. Fifty-four different mining codes, fifty-four tax regimes, fifty-four investment frameworks, negotiating one at a time against buyers who are perfectly coordinated. We are not being outmaneuvered because we are weak. We are being outmaneuvered because we arrive separately.
And trade. 5 years into the AfCFTA, intra-African trade sits at only about 16% of the continent’s total, somewhere between $214 and $220 billion. In Asia the equivalent figure is around 59 per cent, in Europe around 68. UNECA estimates full implementation is worth $450 billion in cumulative GDP by 2035. The infrastructure financing gap standing between us and that number runs at $68 to $108 billion a year.
Every one of these is a problem that a coordinated African position could move, and that no African country will solve on its own. A continental floor for mineral beneficiation. A single negotiating mandate on critical minerals, the way we ran a single negotiating mandate on cartography. A peace and security architecture with the authority and the money to act in Sudan and eastern DRC without waiting for a Security Council that has told us for two decades what it thinks of the Ezulwini Consensus.
Africa Needs to Pay for it
There is one number that undercuts all of this, and we should stop being polite about it. In 2027, more than 79% of the African Union’s program budget is projected to be funded by international partners. Member States, African Institutions and internal sources’ financing of that program budget will be only 20.4%. The 0.2% cent import levy agreed at Kigali in 2016 to finance the African Union remains badly implemented a decade on.
We cannot ask the AU Commission to drive Agenda 2063 while three-quarters of its programs depend on money raised outside the continent. An institution funded by others will, eventually and however good its people are, take its priorities from others. If the map vote proved that the Commission could convene, sequence and land a continental campaign in a hostile diplomatic environment, then the honest response is to give it the means to do that on the things that cost us lives and money, not only on the things that cost the world nothing to concede.
What I hope our leaders take from this: A Stronger African Union
Twice this year, in the same hall, with the same method, Africa asked for something and got it. Not because the world grew generous, but because 54 states decided in advance what they wanted, chose one of their own to carry it, and refused to be split.
That is the lesson, and it has a very short shelf life. Symbolic wins are seductive precisely because they are cheap. The temptation now is to bank the applause, put the Equal Earth map on the wall at the next summit, and go back to negotiating our minerals one country at a time while Sudan burns.
The map was the easy correction. It was still worth making, and I would defend it against anyone who calls it trivial, because how you are seen shapes what you are offered. But the distortions that cost us most are not on any projection. They are in a continent that trades only 16% with itself, captures only 2% of the value of its own minerals, hosts nearly half the world’s displaced people, and funds only 20% of its own union’s programs.
We have just shown, twice, that we know exactly how to fix things when we decide to act as one. There is no longer any mystery about the method. What remains is whether we are willing to use it on ourselves, back home.
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By Michelle Ndiaye, Desire Assogbavi and Mwende Mueke
The article has been published in French by MONDAFRIQUE
“The UN was not created to take mankind to heaven, but to save humanity from hell.”: Dag Hammarskjöld
There is a question that used to be whispered at the margins of diplomatic gatherings. Today it is asked openly in African Union corridors, in Global South think-tanks, in the halls of the US Congress: Is the United Nations still relevant? Does the world still need it?
It deserves a serious, unsentimental answer, not a defensive reflex from those who work in multilateral institutions, and not a cynical reaction from those exhausted by their failures. So let us face the full picture: the strongest case against the UN, an honest look at a world without it, and the answer both point toward.
The World Changed. The UN Didn’t.
The United Nations was designed in 1945 by 51 countries emerging from the most destructive war in history. The five victors, the United States, the United Kingdom, France, the Soviet Union, and China, wrote the rules, gave themselves permanent Security Council seats, and armed each seat with a veto. A grand bargain for global security.
The world that institution was built for no longer exists. The UN now counts 193 member states, nearly four times the original number. The global population has more than tripled, from 2.5 billion to over 8 billion. And the entire continent of Africa, 54 nations, more than 1.4 billion people, was largely under colonial rule when the Charter was signed. Africans were not at the table when the rules were written. Yet roughly 70 percent of the Security Council’s agenda now concerns Africa, and Africa does not hold a single permanent seat on that Council. The UN Secretary-General himself has called this arrangement “a relic of the colonial era.” The African Union’s Ezulwini Consensus has demanded two permanent seats with full veto rights since 2005. Two decades of diplomacy. No structural change – yet: that is not a footnote. That is an indictment.
The numbers on paralysis are just as damning. In 2024, the permanent members cast eight vetoes on seven draft resolutions, the most since 1986. In 2025, vetoes again blocked meaningful action on Gaza and Ukraine, and the Council adopted only 44 resolutions, the lowest figure since 1991. Wars in Sudan, Myanmar, Gaza, and Ukraine have unfolded before a body structurally incapable of acting whenever a permanent member, or its close ally, is a party to the conflict. The pattern is old: in 1994, the Council received prior warning of the Rwandan genocide and failed to act; closed to one million people were killed in 100 days. A law that cannot be enforced is, in practice, no law at all.
Then there is the money. The United States owes roughly $1.5 billion in unpaid assessments, arrears that have since climbed above $2 billion, while China has run hundreds of millions behind. Secretary-General António Guterres has warned bluntly of a “race to bankruptcy,” proposing a 15 percent cut to the UN’s regular budget for 2026 and the elimination of roughly 2,600 posts. Meanwhile, the wider financial architecture built alongside the UN, the IMF and World Bank, still weights voting power toward wealthy nations, and many African countries lose more each year in debt-servicing payments than they receive in development aid.
Under-resourced. Structurally unrepresentative. Repeatedly unable to act. The critics are not wrong about any of this.
The Thought Experiment: Close the UN Tomorrow
So, imagine the institution dissolves tomorrow. What actually happens?
First, humanitarian collapse: within days, not years. UN agencies are the primary responders to the world’s crises. The World Food Program feeds on the order of 150 million people a year. UNHCR protects more than 40 million refugees among over 100 million forcibly displaced people worldwide. UNICEF vaccinates children in over 190 countries. These are not bureaucratic abstractions; they are lifelines. Cambodia, the Great Lakes, Yemen, shows exactly what happens when crises fall outside great powers’ strategic interests: the world looks away.
Second, the framework of international law buckles. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR), The Geneva Conventions, the Genocide Convention, the Convention on the Rights of the Child, the Law of the Sea, the treaties would survive on paper, but the machinery that monitors and implements them would not. Without a universal body, international law reverts to what it was before 1945: an instrument wielded chiefly by those powerful enough to enforce it.
Third, the only universal forum disappears. The UN General Assembly is the one place on earth where all nations, large and small, rich and desperately poor, speak with equal formal standing. Scholars have observed that if the UN did not exist, it could never be created today; it was only possible because of the cataclysmic shock of the Second World War, a window that will not reopen. What would remain are clubs of the powerful and exclusive: the G7, the G20, BRICS, ad hoc coalitions. Collective action through those groupings would always be seen, correctly, as the strong imposing their will on the weak. Not representative of a global consensus. The small island state facing sea-level rise, the landlocked developing nation, the post-conflict society: their voices exist in the global conversation because the UN gives them a seat.
The choice, then, is not between the imperfect UN and some better alternative. It is between the imperfect UN and a more dangerous, more fragmented, and less accountable approach to multilateralism.
What the UN Has Actually Delivered
The legitimate critique should not bury the record. Since 1948, the UN has mounted more than 70 peacekeeping operations, helping end conflicts in Cambodia, Mozambique, and East Timor, among others. Its system helped pressure apartheid South Africa toward transition. It drove the eradication of smallpox and the near elimination of polio. The Montreal Protocol, a UN-negotiated treaty, is healing the ozone layer. The Paris Agreement, however imperfect, exists only because the UN’s negotiating architecture exists.
Most significantly: no war between the great powers in 80 years, the longest such stretch in modern history, sustained by norms, institutions, and permanent channels for dialogue that did not exist in 1914 or 1939. And there is a deeper achievement still. Before the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, human rights were philosophical aspirations, not legal entitlements. The UN created the framework within which governments are, however imperfectly, held to account for what they do to their own citizens. The Global South then used that framework to expand the idea itself: the 1986 Declaration on the Right to Development was fought for and won inside the UN, through the Group of 77 and decades of coalition-building. Remove the institution, and those hard-won gains lose their home.
Not Whether, But Which
The real question is not whether the world needs the United Nations. It is which United Nations the world needs. A body that devotes 70 percent of its security agenda to Africa while denying Africa a permanent voice is not just unjust, it is operationally dysfunctional. A Council whose vetoes shield aggression and block action on mass atrocity is not a security council; it is a great-power protection racket dressed in the language of law. These are not reasons to walk away. They are the reasons reform is urgent and non-negotiable.
Expand the Security Council with genuine African permanent representation. Consistent with the Ezulwini Consensus: permanent African seats with full veto rights, or, if the veto is curbed, equal standing for all permanent members. The 2024 Pact for the Future committed leaders to a consolidated reform model; that commitment must now be forced from paper into negotiation.
Rebuild international financial architecture as a matter of justice, not charity. Restructure IMF and World Bank voting weights and deliver systematic debt relief for countries trapped in cycles of extraction, and stabilize the UN’s own finances, starting with major powers paying what they legally owe.
Create universal governance for the new existential challenges. Artificial intelligence, climate change, cyber conflict, and pandemic preparedness cannot be managed through bilateral deals and clubs of the rich. Only a universal framework confers legitimacy on rules meant to bind everyone.
Organize the Global South to negotiate as a force, not a fragment. Common African and Global South positions on Council reform, climate finance, AI governance, and the post-SDG agenda, developed internally, deployed coherently, so that every multilateral room is entered with one voice and real leverage.
The Courage to Reform What We Cannot Afford to Lose
Hammarskjöld’s words remain the most honest description of the UN: not a vehicle for perfection, but a barrier against catastrophe, a hedge against a world where the only law is power and the only protection is the alliance you can assemble before the shooting starts.
The world has transformed since 1945. The institution has not kept pace, and the costs fall heaviest on those least able to bear them. But the answer to an imperfect institution is not its destruction; it is its transformation. As WTO Director-General Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala has urged: preserve what works, reform what no longer does, and reposition for a future the founders could not imagine.
We still need the United Nations more, not less, as the world grows more dangerous and more interdependent. But the UN we have is not yet the UN we need. Building it, rule-based, representative, just, effective, and genuinely inclusive of the Global South, is the defining challenge of this multilateral moment.
About the authors
Michelle Ndiaye is Director of Transformative Peace in Africa at the Open Society Foundations.
Désiré Assogbavi is Advocacy Advisor for Africa at the Open Society Foundations.
Mwende Mueke is Associate Director of Democratic Futures in Africa at the Open Society Foundations.
If you’d like to receive my articles automatically as soon as they’re published, simply follow this blog using the “Follow” button at the bottom left of this page or send me an email at Desire.Assogbavi@Assodesire.com
The 4th U.S.- Africa Futures Summit brought the conversation onto African soil. What emerged in Addis Ababa was not simply a call for a better partnership, but a practical test of whether Africa can convert global competition into collective bargaining power, and whether the United States can turn its new language of investment into visible delivery.
On 25 August 2026, the U.S.- Africa Futures Summit met in Addis Ababa for the first time, after three editions rooted in Washington, D.C. The move mattered. Addis is the political and diplomatic capital of the continent, the home of the African Union.
Seven takeaways stayed with me.
1. Beyond the Corridors of Power
In my opening framing, on behalf of the Open Society Foundations, co-host of the Summit, I argued that the future of U.S.- Africa relations can no longer be designed exclusively in presidential palaces, foreign-ministry corridors or the boardrooms of international institutions. It must also be shaped by young people, women entrepreneurs, civil society, artists, researchers and communities. That was not a ceremonial appeal for inclusion. It went to the heart of why this gathering mattered.
The participation of the U.S. Mission to the African Union and the representative of the Chairperson of the African Union Commission gave the exchange particular weight. Both acknowledged that the relationship must evolve. Both placed economic opportunity at its centre. Both recognized the importance of the African Continental Free Trade Area and cross-border infrastructure.
2. Competition is real, but Africa must organize its leverage
One of the most candid statements of the day came from the U.S. Chargé d’Affaires to the African Union Mr. Walter Parrs: competition is real, and the United States intends to compete, but competition alone is not a strategy for partnership. That distinction matters.
U.S.- Africa relations are increasingly described through rivalry with China. Europe, India, the Gulf states and other actors are also expanding their economic and political footprints. Africa is courted because of its markets, diplomatic weight, young population, strategic geography and resources essential to the energy and digital transitions. Yet renewed attention does not automatically create African leverage. It can just as easily produce a new scramble in which countries compete against one another, bargain bilaterally from weak positions and accept short-term deals that undermine long-term transformation.
Africa should not be pushed into choosing one geopolitical camp. Strategic multi-alignment is not indecision. Properly organized, it is leverage. But it works only when African countries know what they want, negotiate around common positions and possess the capacity to make partners compete on African priorities. Fifty-five states do not become a geopolitical bloc simply by sitting under one continental flag. Agency must be organized.
3. The partnership must be measured by delivery, co-creation and greater sovereignty
The representative of the African Union Commission’s Chairperson, Mohamed Sougal, offered the most useful measure of success. He argued that the U.S. – AU Strategic Infrastructure and Investment Working Group should be judged by what people can see and feel: jobs created, businesses supported, infrastructure delivered, trade expanded and opportunities opened for young people.
That is not rhetoric. It is a measurement standard that governments, citizens and civil society can use. The Working Group now needs a transparent pipeline of projects, public measures of local procurement, value addition, jobs and regional trade. Otherwise, it risks joining the long list of mechanisms that sounded promising at launch but never became visible in people’s lives.
The AU representative also called for a move from assistance to investment, from isolated projects to strategic cooperation, and from consultation to co-creation.
The fashionable phrase “from aid to trade” is equally incomplete. Trade can reproduce extraction, and investment can concentrate wealth or leave governments carrying risk while private actors capture the gains. Cooperation should instead strengthen national systems, mobilize domestic revenue, transfer capability and build the infrastructure, skills and industries that reduce dependency over time.
This is also why financial sovereignty matters. When I attended the AU Ministerial Joint Specialized Technical Committee meeting in Abidjan in July and watched the African Credit Rating Agency move from concept towards its Port Louis launch, I saw the same struggle from another angle. A continent constrained by high borrowing costs and permanent fiscal dependency cannot co-create partnerships on equal terms.
4. Critical minerals are important test of the new relationship
No issue captured the contradictions of the emerging partnership more clearly than critical minerals. The world already knows that it wants Africa’s cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese, graphite and other strategic resources. The question I posed at the opening was: how much of the value generated by those minerals will stay on the continent and help meet Africa’s development needs?
If African countries continue negotiating one by one, exporting largely unprocessed ores and treating environmental and community rights as secondary, the current rush will repeat an old story. The commodities will change, but the structure will not: value created abroad, few jobs at home, weakened public institutions and communities left with the environmental and social costs.
Critical-mineral diplomacy must become industrial diplomacy. Agreements should connect extraction to power generation, transport, processing, research, skills, supplier development and regional markets. Legal and geological expertise should be pooled. Local-content rules must be credible and coordinated. The AfCFTA should help create regional value chains at a scale individual economies cannot achieve alone.
Beneficiation cannot be pursued at any price. Free, prior and informed consent, environmental safeguards and fair community benefit-sharing are not obstacles to industrialization; they are what make it legitimate and durable. The United States wants diversified and resilient supply chains. African countries want industrialization and greater value retention. Those interests can align, but only if agreements distribute opportunity as seriously as they distribute risk.
5. Mobility, peace, democracy and rights are part of the economic agenda
The Summit rightly refused to treat migration, peace, security, democracy and human rights as side issues. They determine whether economic gains are shared, whether institutions remain legitimate and whether partnerships endure.
The migration discussion challenged the portrayal of African mobility as principally a crisis at Europe’s or America’s border. Much African migration occurs within the continent, through cities, regional labour markets and displacement caused by conflict or climate stress. Restrictive policies do not remove the pressures that make people move. They make movement more dangerous, expensive and unequal.
A serious partnership should expand safe and regular pathways, protect migrant workers, improve the portability of qualifications and rights, and support Africa’s free-movement agenda. It should also treat the diaspora as more than a source of remittances. The diaspora brings knowledge, investment, professional networks, cultural influence and political access that can connect the two continents on more equal terms.
Peace and security raised a parallel warning. ‘African-led solutions’ cannot become diplomatic shorthand for burden-shifting. Ownership requires predictable resources, capable continental and regional institutions, sustained diplomacy and meaningful participation by affected communities. Security partnerships that ignore corruption, civic repression, exclusion or the economic frustrations of young people may contain immediate threats while deepening the conditions that produce instability.
6. Representation is only the beginning; influence requires capacity and accountability
The African Union’s permanent membership in the G20 was a historic achievement, but a seat at the table is valuable only when the person occupying it arrives with a negotiating positions and the machinery to follow through.
I have made this argument in previous writings on Africa’s place in global governance: institutional inclusion is a beginning, not an outcome. Africa’s demographic weight, resources and moral claims do not automatically shape decisions. Influence comes from preparation, coalition-building and the ability to connect continental positions to national implementation.
The same principle applies to civil society. Inviting citizens’ groups into a room is not meaningful participation if decisions have already been made or if those groups lack the resources and access to monitor delivery. Civil society must help define priorities, scrutinize agreements and hold governments and investors accountable. In a period of shrinking civic space and increasingly transactional diplomacy, that role becomes more important, not less.
The Summit demonstrated the value of placing government, diplomatic, research, philanthropic, business, diaspora and civil-society voices in the same conversation. Its next test is whether those voices remain connected when the conference room empties.
7. The Summit must now become a year-round platform for action
The 4th Summit did not produce an intergovernmental declaration, and that was not its purpose. Its value lay in the clarity of the diagnosis and the possibility of turning an annual gathering into a platform that influences policy throughout the year.
The organizers signalled several immediate next steps: a substantive synthesis of the proceedings; recommendations for African governments and institutions as well as U.S. policy; mapping the policy windows where those recommendations can travel; stronger research and communications; and a follow-up process to narrow priorities and identify leadership. A future “doers” track was also proposed so that the next Summit can assess what changed between gatherings.
Those commitments should now be organized into a simple inter-Summit architecture. 1st, the partners should select two or three issues on which collective action can realistically make a difference, rather than trying to carry the entire U.S.- Africa agenda. 2nd, each priority should have named co-leads from African and U.S. institutions, supported by experts, civil society and practitioners. 3rd, the platform should map its advocacy calendar across the UN General Assembly, the African Union Summit, international financial meetings, business forums and diaspora convenings. 4th, small working sessions should be held between Summits to test recommendations, unblock specific problems and connect decision-makers with those implementing policies. 5th, a short public progress tracker should record commitments, action taken, obstacles and results.
Communications should also continue between convenings. High-quality research needs to be translated into accessible policy papers, commentary, media engagement and targeted briefings. African experts and practitioners should be supported to carry the platform’s ideas into Washington, Addis Ababa and other decision-making spaces, rather than being repeatedly invited to restate them at side events.
The next Summit should begin with an accountability session, not another diagnosis. We should be able to answer: What changed? Which institution acted? What project moved? What policy was influenced? Who benefited? Where did implementation stall? This ‘doers’ track should become the institutional memory of the platform and the bridge between annual gatherings.
If that happens, the Summit can become more than an event. It can serve as a modest but credible mechanism for agenda-setting, coalition-building and sustained pressure for delivery.
The future is being negotiated now
What stayed with me after Addis was not a new slogan. It was a clearer understanding of the choice facing both sides.
Africa does not come to this relationship only with needs. It brings markets, ideas, culture, diplomatic weight, a young workforce, strategic geography, natural resources and solutions to global problems. But potential does not negotiate. Institutions do. Common positions do. Technical knowledge, infrastructure and coordinated markets do.
For the United States, the choice is between episodic engagement driven by competition and crisis, or a relationship of strategic depth. The latter requires consistency across political cycles, respect for African priorities, investment in regional integration and a willingness to share value rather than merely secure access.
The Addis Summit did not resolve the contradictions in U.S.-Africa relations. It did something more useful: it placed them in the open and gave us a clearer standard for judging what comes next. The relationship’s next chapter should be measured less by the warmth of its language than by the strength of the institutions it builds, the fairness of the agreements it produces and the opportunities ordinary people can actually see.
The future is being negotiated now. Addis made clear which future Africans want. The work between this Summit and the next is to build the power, coalitions and accountability required to secure it.
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Excellencies, distinguished guests, colleagues, partners, friends, good morning, and welcome.
On behalf of the Open Society Foundations, it is a great pleasure to welcome you to the U.S.-Africa Futures Summit.
I would like to begin by thanking our co-hosts and partners, and especially everyone who has travelled from across Africa, the United States and beyond to be part of this important conversation.
We gather at an extraordinary moment.
The world around us is changing rapidly.
The international order that has shaped relations between Africa and the United States for decades is under pressure.
Geopolitical competition is intensifying.
Development assistance is being reconsidered.
Debt burdens are constraining governments.
Climate change is accelerating.
Artificial intelligence and new technologies are transforming our economies and our life.
Friends, the future of U.S.-Africa relations cannot be designed exclusively in presidential palaces, foreign ministries, boardrooms or international institutions.
It must also be informed by young people, women, entrepreneurs, civil society, artists, researchers, communities and citizens themselves.
That is one reason why gatherings like this Summit matter.
We need spaces where government can speak with civil society;
where policymakers can hear entrepreneurs;
where Africans can challenge Americans and Americans can challenge Africans; and where we can move beyond diplomatic language to ask difficult questions about what is working, what is failing, and what needs to change.
Against this backdrop, the questions before us are:
What is the future of U.S.- Africa relations?
What kind of relationship do Africans and Americans want to build together for the future? And who gets to shape it?
For too long, discussions about Africa’s relationships with major global powers have often begun somewhere other than Africa…
The future cannot be constructed that way.
At the Open Society Foundations, we believe that Africa must not simply be a ground in which global competition plays out.
Africa must be a full actor of the emerging global order.
Africa possesses resources essential to the global energy transition. It is building the world’s largest free-trade area by number of participating countries.
Today, African countries are engaging with multiple partners not necessarily because they want to choose one geopolitical camp over another, but because they are seeking partnerships capable of advancing their own development and strategic interests.
That requires us to move beyond an old paradigm.
Beyond aid to agency. Beyond donor and recipient.
On critical minerals.
The global transition toward clean energy is creating enormous demand for resources that Africa possesses in abundance. But the fundamental question for Africa is no longer simply whether the world wants its cobalt, copper, lithium, manganese or graphite. We already know that it does.
The question is: How much of the value generated by those resources will remain in Africa?
Will African countries simply export another generation of raw materials?
Or can this moment, help finance infrastructure, build industries, create decent jobs, expand regional value chains, develop skills and accelerate Africa’s economic transformation?
Friends, Partnership must increasingly be measured not simply by what comes to Africa, but by what Africa is able to build, own, and shape.
And this conversation is not only about economics.
It is also about democracy, human rights and the relationship between citizens and power.
And perhaps we should also be comfortable with disagreement.
A genuine partnership does not require us to agree on everything.
It requires us to respect one another enough to have difficult conversations about democracy and human rights, about trade, about migration, about security, about global governance, about historical injustices, and about the distribution of economic power.
At OSF, we see another dimension that is increasingly important: Africa’s role in shaping the global system itself.
The African Union’s permanent membership in the G20 was an important recognition of Africa’s growing geopolitical weight.
But representation must now translate into influence.
Africa should not only have a seat at the table. Africa must have the capacity to shape what is on the table.
As we begin this Summit, I would invite us to resist the temptation simply to diagnose the problems. Let us use this space to identify possibilities.
What would a genuinely modern U.S. – Africa economic partnership looks like?
How do we move from extraction to value creation?
How do we ensure that young people on both sides see opportunities?
How can Africa and the United States work together to strengthen democracy, rule of law and justice.
How do we reform international institutions so that they reflect today’s world rather than the world of 1945?
And perhaps most importantly: What can the people, gathered in this room, actually do differently after this Summit?
Because ultimately, the success of our conversations will not be measured by the elegance of our declarations.
It will be measured by the partnerships we build, the policies we influence, the assumptions we challenge, and the opportunities we create for people.
At the Open Society Foundations, we are proud to co-host this Summit because we believe deeply in the value of bringing together diverse voices to confront difficult questions, and in ensuring that African voices are not simply present in global debates, but powerful in shaping their outcomes.
The future of U.S. -Africa relations is not predetermined. It is being negotiated right now. And everyone in this room has a role in shaping it.
So let us be ambitious.
Let us be candid.
Let us listen to one another.
And above all, let us imagine a U.S. – Africa relationship that is not defined by the structures we inherited, but by the future we are prepared to build together.
On behalf of the Open Society Foundations, thank you for joining us.
Welcome to the U.S. – Africa Futures Summit.
And I wish us all a productive, courageous and forward-looking conversation.
On 25 August 2026, I will join policymakers, diplomats, civil society leaders, researchers and diaspora voices in Addis Ababa for the 4th U.S.-Africa Futures Summit. I participated in the previous two editions in Washington, D.C. and have seen the platform develop into an increasingly important space for examining Africa’s place in a rapidly changing world.
Following last year’s Summit at Howard University, I published an article titled “From Aid to Agency: Africa at a Crossroads in a Divided World.” I argued that moving from aid to agency was not simply a compelling slogan. It was becoming a survival strategy for a continent navigating intensifying geopolitical competition, weakening multilateralism, rising debt, institutional fragmentation and a renewed global race for its natural resources. One year later, that argument became even more urgent. You can read my reflections from last year’s Summit here .
This year’s edition marks an important turning point. For the first time, the U.S.-Africa Futures Summit will be held on the African continent. Bringing the conversation from Washington to Addis Ababa, the diplomatic capital of Africa and the home of the African Union, is more than a change of venue. It helps place African institutions, priorities and perspectives closer to the center of a relationship too often interpreted and designed elsewhere.
The timing could hardly be more consequential. The international system is undergoing profound reordering. Multilateral norms are weakening. Development cooperation is becoming more transactional. Competition for Africa’s critical minerals is intensifying. Migration is increasingly approached through restrictions and security concerns. Meanwhile, internationally sponsored peace processes continue to raise difficult questions about African ownership, institutional legitimacy and long-term sustainability.
But Africa is not simply a passive victim of these global disruptions. The continent has strategic assets, demographic weight, diplomatic reach and growing geopolitical leverage. The real question is whether African countries can convert these advantages into collective bargaining power, stronger institutions and better outcomes for their people.
Across five interconnected sessions, the Summit will examine what African agency should mean in practice.
1/Africa in an Emerging Multipolar World
The opening session will examine how geopolitical competition, evolving U.S. strategic narratives and the erosion of the international rules-based order are reshaping Africa’s position in the world. This mix of African policy, peace and security, governance, foresight and U.S. foreign-policy expertise should allow for a serious examination of both sides of the relationship.
The challenge is not only to secure more African representation in global institutions. Africa already has an expanding diplomatic presence, including the African Union’s permanent membership of the G20. The deeper challenge is to translate representation into influence, through coordinated positions, stronger negotiating capacity and the institutional power to implement continental priorities. Africa must not become merely a theatre in which the United States, China, Europe, Russia and emerging powers pursue their rivalries. It must be a strategic actor capable of defining its interests and negotiating with all partners from a position of clarity and strength.
2/ Redefining Development Cooperation
A second session will explore how Africa should respond as traditional aid models contract and new partnerships become more conditional, bilateral and transactional. This discussion will examine emerging health compacts, the America First Global Health Strategy, lessons from the Ebola response, domestic resource mobilisation, external financing and the role of civil society in holding governments and international partners accountable.
The fundamental question is not whether Africa still needs international cooperation. It is what kind of cooperation can reinforce African priorities instead of reproducing dependency.
As development budgets shrink and donor priorities change, African countries will need to expand domestic resource mobilization, reduce illicit financial flows, improve the governance of public resources and negotiate external financing more strategically.
The future must be built around mutual responsibility: African governments strengthening accountability and domestic capacity, while international partners respect policy autonomy and move away from relationships defined by short-term geopolitical transactions.
3/ Critical Mineral, From Extraction to Transformation and Beneficiation
The global energy transition has placed Africa’s mineral wealth at the heart of renewed geopolitical competition. Yet strategic importance does not automatically produce development.
Africa can possess the minerals the world needs and still remain trapped at the bottom of global value chains, exporting raw materials while importing higher-value technologies and manufactured products.
The key question is therefore not simply who gains access to Africa’s minerals. It is who determines the terms, who captures the value and what productive capacity remains after extraction. African governments must use the current competition to negotiate investments that integrate processing, infrastructure, energy, technology transfer, skills development and industrialization. Mineral agreements must also be transparent, environmentally responsible and respectful of communities and workers.
The transition we need is clear: from extraction to transformation; from exporting geological wealth to building industrial capability; and from fragmented bilateral agreements to regional strategies connected to the AfCFTA and the African Union’s broader development ambitions.
4/ Migration, Mobility and Diaspora Power
The Summit will also launch and discuss new African Futures research on migration, demographic change, urbanization, displacement and labor mobility. Too much of the international debate portrays African migration primarily as a crisis directed toward Europe or the United States. That framing ignores the reality that much African migration takes place within the continent and that mobility is also a driver of trade, knowledge, innovation and regional integration. The conversation must move beyond border enforcement, deportation agreements and visa restrictions.
A forward-looking U.S.-Africa partnership should create safe and regular pathways for mobility, protect human rights and recognize the strategic contribution of the African diaspora, not only through remittances, but through knowledge, investment, political influence, professional networks and bridge-building. Africa’s own frameworks, including the AU Migration Policy Framework, the Protocol on Free Movement and the AfCFTA, must form part of this discussion.
5/ Peace, Security and African Ownership
Finally, the Summit will assess internationally supported peace processes and their implications for conflicts in Sudan, the Democratic Republic of Congo and other affected regions. External diplomatic engagement can be valuable, but it should reinforce rather than displace African institutions and locally grounded processes.
Peace agreements cannot be judged by the visibility of the mediators or the speed of their announcement. They must be judged by their legitimacy, inclusiveness, implementation, protection of civilians and ability to address the political and economic drivers of conflict. The long-term objective must be to strengthen the African Union and regional mechanisms so that they can prevent conflict, coordinate diplomacy and sustain peace—not simply respond after crises have escalated.
The Bigger Questions!
These five discussions are connected by one central issue: African agency.
Can Africa define its priorities rather than merely react to the priorities of others?
Can it coordinate across national borders and negotiate from collective strength?
Can it transform its resources, demographic weight and diplomatic presence into industrial power, policy autonomy and improvements in people’s lives?
A modern U.S.-Africa relationship must be measured not by the number of summits, declarations or investment announcements it produces, but by the mutual value it creates, the rights it protects, the African institutions it strengthens and the durable capabilities it leaves behind.
Africa is not waiting for a new global order to be designed elsewhere. Across diplomacy, finance, resources, mobility, development and peace, African actors are already negotiating how the continent will exercise greater agency and shape fairer partnerships.
The 4th U.S.-Africa Futures Summit provides an important space to take that conversation forward, from analysis to concrete policy choices.
I am proud that the Open Society Foundations is co-convening this timely dialogue alongside Humanity United Foundation, the Global Futures Collaborative and the Institute for Security Studies.
In-person registration is now closed, but you can still register to receive the Summit recordings.
If you’d like to receive my articles automatically as soon as they’re published, simply follow this blog using the “Follow” button at the bottom left of this page or send me an email at Desire.Assogbavi@Assodesire.com
