World leaders arrive in New York next week for the high-level debate of the 81st General Assembly, under a theme about restoring trust and managing transformation. 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 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 Institute joined three other organisations in a federal suit to overturn the sanctions regime, and the Open Society Justice Initiative represents Judge Kimberly Prost in a separate case brought by three ICC judges. US courts have already found the order unconstitutional in earlier challenges on free-speech grounds.

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 Right to Development at 40: a covenant left waiting

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.

Durban at 25: we are moving in the wrong direction

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, 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. It also requires African leaders to say plainly, to each other and to their own parties, that migrants are not electoral fuel. 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.

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. So, 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 particular session, I would highlight the following asks.

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. Aid to sub-Saharan Africa is forecast to fall by another 11.6 percent this year.

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 eight decades and nine 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

Ring-fence human rights funding. Human rights costs the UN system under one percent 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 Charter opens with the peoples, adding: “Not we the powerful. Not we the victorious.” It is a useful test for the coming weeks.

The general debate ends on 28 September. People in Africa, and everyone who relies on the UN’s human rights machinery, will judge this session by what happens next: whether dues are paid, whether investigators are hired, whether the ICC can work without intimidation, and whether the next Secretary-General is chosen in the open.

Follow this space for my post-UNGA81 analysis, when we will know whether any of this moved.

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By Désiré Assogbavi and Renata Albuquerque Ribeiro

This article has been first published by Project Syndicate

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.

Désiré Assogbavi

Désiré Assogbavi is Africa Adviser at the Open Society Foundations.

Renata Albuquerque Ribeiro

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 4^th 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 4^th 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. 1^st, 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. 2^nd, each priority should have named co-leads from African and U.S. institutions, supported by experts, civil society and practitioners. 3^rd, the platform should map its advocacy calendar across the UN General Assembly, the African Union Summit, international financial meetings, business forums and diaspora convenings. 4^th, small working sessions should be held between Summits to test recommendations, unblock specific problems and connect decision-makers with those implementing policies. 5^th, 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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Addis Ababa, 25 August 2026

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.

I thank you.

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.

More information:
https://humanityunited.org/us-africa-futures-summit-2026/

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Three days in Accra (27-29 July 2026) kept circling back to a single triangle: governance, conflict and critical minerals, and how tightly the three are bound together. Where governance is transparent, accountable and inclusive, minerals become a foundation for peace and shared prosperity. Where it is weak or captured, the same minerals become a driver of exclusion, instability and, too often, war, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Sudan to Mozambique’s Cabo Delgado. Our final plenary did not treat these as three separate conversations. It treated governance as the variable that decides which way the other two tip, and it converged on seven propositions built on that premise, concrete enough to act on Monday morning, ambitious enough to still matter in ten years.

1. Make Ownership Visible

Nothing else on this list matters if citizens cannot see who profits from what comes out of their soil. That starts with beneficial ownership registers that end opaque permitting and unmonitored contracts, and with legal and policy frameworks built specifically for the energy-transition era rather than retrofitted from decades-old mining codes. Human rights and environmental protection have to sit inside that foundation from the start, not arrive as an afterthought once the contracts are already signed. Transparency is not a compliance checkbox, it is the precondition for everything that follows, and it is where every other proposition on this list begins.

2. Turn Consultation into Ownership

Communities have been consulted for decades. What they have rarely been given is a stake, and exclusion, not scarcity, is what turns a mining region into a conflict zone. The room pointed to models that already exist and work: the Bafokeng arrangement in South Africa and comparable Australian examples, where community ownership and revenue equity are structural, not symbolic. That principle has to extend to the estimated 150,000 artisanal miners in Kenya alone, through formalization, licensing, skills, financing, safer practices, and to the communities left exposed to unregulated private security forces, a conflict driver raised pointedly in the Nigerian context. None of it holds without protecting the people who expose corruption when it happens: whistleblowers, journalists, and human rights defenders. Governance reform means nothing if the people doing the accountability work aren’t safe doing it.

3. Mandate Value Addition, Not Just Extraction

Africa’s oldest mineral trap is exporting raw material and importing the finished product. The fix has to be written into contracts themselves: local value addition mandated from extraction through processing, not left to goodwill or market forces. This is where the continent’s industrial future is actually decided, not in the mine, but in whether the processing, manufacturing and skills development happen here or somewhere else. Every proposition above depends on this one holding: ownership and community equity mean little if the value they’re entitled to share in keeps leaving the continent unprocessed.

4. Build Strong Continental Institutions

Rather than wait another twenty years for 55 countries to align, the AfCFTA‘s own timeline was raised, more than once, as a cautionary tale, the room pushed toward institutions with real financial and legal weight. A Pan-African Sovereign Wealth Fund to finance skills development, green industrial policy and compliance monitoring. A Pan-African Critical Minerals Council bringing mining chambers, chambers of commerce, central bank governors and technical experts to one table. A functional African Commodities Exchange, already operating across sixteen countries and linked to AfCFTA, proof this is not purely aspirational. And standardized templates for strategic partnership agreements, so no single government negotiates alone against far better-resourced global counterparts. These institutions are what turn Propositions 1 through 3 from national good intentions into continental practice.

5. Close the Enforcement Gap, Don’t Just Widen It

The single most important intervention from our closing session was also the most uncomfortable: new instruments without a supervision mandate just become paper. We already have mining codes. We already have an African Mining Vision, we already have a progressive Africa’s Green Mineral Strategy. The gap has never been imagination, it is enforcement, and the alignment between what continental frameworks promise and what national law actually delivers. That means evaluating and reviving what already exists before building new instruments on top of one we never finished implementing, and it means giving Open Society Foundations and partners, an evaluative role that multiple participants asked for directly: assess the real implementation gap and support a citizen-facing tracking dashboard so civil society can do the accountability work governments are unlikely to do on themselves. This proposition is the test the other six will ultimately be judged by, whether the dashboard tracking our own promises actually goes live.

6. Build the Tools, Not Just the Asks

We were rightly challenged to move beyond broad recommendations and develop practical instruments that policymakers, communities, and advocates can immediately use. These should include a model strategic partnership agreement and a standardized beneficial ownership registry template to operationalize Proposition 1. For Proposition 2, we need a community-level free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) standard that is legally enforceable, not merely an aspiration contained in an international document.

Our advocacy must also focus on a concrete and immediate opportunity: securing the ratification of the statute establishing the African Minerals Development Centre. This is an existing AU commitment awaiting sufficient ratifications and therefore represents an achievable near-term win, distinct from the longer-term institution-building agenda set out in Proposition 4. Strengthening the African Legal Support Facility at the African Development Bank should also be part of this effort, giving Member States the technical and legal capacity to negotiate mineral agreements collectively and from a position of strength, rather than in isolation.

7. Negotiate as One Africa

We are not negotiating in a vacuum. The United States, Russia, China, and now the EU through Global Gateway, are actively reshaping their national mining policies, in some cases, even constitutions. Much of that financing is debt, not grants, and several of our countries are already highly leveraged from oil and gas; ownership rhetoric has to be matched with honest debt-risk analysis, or we simply repeat the extractive cycle in a new form, with better branding. The only viable counterweight, raised again and again in the room, is unity: a common continental negotiating position, backed by a political and advocacy engagement strategy with the African Union and its Member States, and by engaging ECOSOCC, the AU’s Economic, Social and Cultural Council, to broaden this coalition well beyond the people who happened to be in Accra with us.

That coalition is where all seven propositions ultimately have to live, not as seven separate initiatives, but as one continental position on the same triangle we opened with: governance, conflict and critical minerals, and the conviction that the first can be made strong enough to defuse the second and make the third a genuine foundation for peace.

This is the work carried forward by the Open Society Foundations across our Democratic Futures, Transformative Peace and Resource Futures in Africa Programs, and by every government, institution and movement that sat in this room with us. Accra was the diagnosis and the design. These seven propositions are what we build next.

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The Next Steps Conference on Reparatory Justice in Accra from 17 to 19 June 2026 did not happen in a vacuum. It was convened as the direct follow-up to a landmark United Nations General Assembly Resolution – A/RES/80/250 – adopted on 25 March this year, in which 123 member states voted to declare the trafficking and chattel enslavement of Africans as the gravest crime against humanity. That resolution, championed by Ghana and backed by African Union member states and the Caribbean community, was the first in the United Nations’ 80-year history dedicated exclusively to slavery and the slave trade. Three months later, Accra was where the world came to decide what to do next.

123  UN Members voted for the Resolution

80+  Countries Represented in Accra

18  Strategic Pillars of the Accra Commitments

3 Global Panels established

“Reparation is a legitimate demand. It is not about vengeance but justice. From Accra, we are sending a clear message that the time has come to restore, reform, and repent.”: H.E. Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa, Ghana’s Minister for Foreign Affairs.

Reparation Is Not Only About the Past

There remains a persistent tendency to cast reparations as a debate about the past: the Accra Conference swiftly dismantled that narrative. Countries across Africa and the Caribbean carry sovereign debt burdens that economists trace directly to the economic structures imposed during slavery and colonial rule, centuries of extracted wealth, suppressed development, and deliberately undercapitalized economies. The same historical processes that enriched Western countries left our countries without the institutional foundations, the accumulated capital, and the human development that compound and grow across generations. When Ghana, Jamaica, or Senegal pays a higher risk premium on international borrowing than a European developed country, that is not a neutral market outcome. It is a legacy.

The same logic applies to climate change. Africa contributes the least to global greenhouse gas emissions and suffers the most from its consequences. The industrial wealth that produced those emissions was built, in significant part, on the labor of enslaved Africans and the resources of colonized African nations. The International Court of Justice’s recent advisory opinion on climate change has now clarified that breaches of climate obligations may themselves give rise to reparations. The circle is closing.

And then there is the less quantified but no less real dimension: the psychological and cultural wound. The systematic erasure of African history, the theft of cultural artifacts, the distortion of knowledge about who we were and what we built before colonization, these are ongoing acts of harm, not finished ones.

What Actually Happened in Those Three Days in Accra

The conference produced a 46-paragraph outcome document titled the Accra Next Steps Commitments,  structured around 18 strategic pillars. But what made this gathering different from previous declarations was that it also produced something rarer: immediate, concrete action.

• The Netherlands pledged to return approximately 2,000 cataloged artifacts to Ghana, with Dutch officials making a symbolic presentation of the full catalog to President Mahama during the conference itself.
• Germany announced its readiness to repatriate cultural artifacts from the Bono Traditional Area.
• Denmark’s foreign minister offered a formal apology for Denmark’s role in the slave trade and committed to partnering with Ghana to preserve the slave forts along our coastline, including Osu Castle, built by Danish colonizers, as permanent sites of memory and truth-telling.
• France’s President Macron, speaking virtually, committed to establishing a joint scientific commission to locate African artifacts currently held in French institutions.

These are not small gestures. The Netherlands’ commitment of 2,000 items would be among the largest single repatriations of African artifacts in history. Denmark’s apology,  formal, unambiguous, from a serving foreign minister at a multilateral conference,  is precisely the kind of acknowledgment that the Accra framework identifies as a foundational step towards reparatory justice.

Three new global institutional bodies were also established:

A High-Level Global Advisory Council on Reparatory Justice,

A Global Expert Panel on the Restitution of Cultural Heritage, and

A Global Legal Panel on Reparatory Justice.

These will build the evidentiary and institutional record that feeds directly into the UN General Assembly’s work in the coming years. The conference also agreed to convene annually, a commitment to sustaining momentum rather than allowing this to become another declaration that gathers dust.

The Architecture of a Global Framework

What strikes a careful reader of the Accra Commitments is how comprehensive and interconnected its vision is. This is not a narrow demand for a cheque. It is a reimagining of the relationship between history and the contemporary global order, structured across 18 interlocking pillars:

Truth & Apology: Full, formal, unconditional acknowledgment, with guarantees of non-repetition and the repeal of colonial-era legal codes.

Legal Justice: Strengthening international, regional and domestic pathways to accountability, redress and access to justice for generational victims.

Compensatory Reparations: Fair and adequate compensation grounded in international law – not charity, but a legal obligation that exists as a matter of international law.

Cultural Restitution: Return of looted artifacts, human remains, and archives to countries of origin. Preservation of slave forts and castles as permanent sites of memory.

Debt Relief & Financial Justice: Comprehensive reform of sovereign debt mechanisms, including cancellation where necessary, and reform of credit rating agencies that impose unjust risk premiums on the Global South.

Climate Justice: Reparatory justice that promotes climate resilience, connecting historical responsibility directly to the climate crisis and its repair.

Health Sovereignty: Addressing medical apartheid, multigenerational health trauma, and the historic exploitation of African bodies in scientific research and experimentation.

Diaspora & Right of Return: Strengthened pathways for citizenship, voluntary return and reintegration, reconnecting Africa with its global family across continents and generations.

Read together, these pillars add up to something important: a claim not just for redress, but for restructuring. The conference did not only ask for an apology. It demanded reform of the UN Security Council, of international financial institutions, of sovereign credit rating agencies, and of the global tax architecture. It called for a Global Reparations Fund. It placed reparatory justice in direct conversation with climate justice, gender justice, and the digital divide. This is a framework for a different world, not just a settlement for the old one.

Museum on the transatlantic enslavement: Among the most significant commitments unveiled in Accra is the decision to establish a modern museum on the transatlantic enslavement in Ghana. More than a memorial, the museum is envisioned as a living institution dedicated to preserving the memory of the millions who endured enslavement, honoring the resilience of their descendants, and advancing a process of truth-telling long overdue. It will also serve as a repository for thousands of looted African artefacts that are gradually being returned from museums and private collections around the world. In this sense, the museum will represent more than a cultural project; it will be a tangible expression of reparatory justice, reconnecting displaced heritage with its homeland and ensuring that future generations inherit not only the memory of historical injustice, but also the dignity of recovery and restoration.

The Honest Questions We Must Also Ask

The Accra conference closed with pledges, not yet with physical returns. The Dutch catalog was presented symbolically; no artifacts have yet made the journey home. Germany had a prior commitment to return items from Ghana’s Volta Region that had not yet been executed. France’s announcement of a scientific commission to locate artifacts is welcome, but it is a process,  not a result. And the UN General Assembly resolution itself is non-binding. It carries profound moral authority; it does not carry legal compulsion.

There is also the question of unity. The Accra Commitments speak movingly of ending fragmentation within the global reparations movement. But anyone who has followed this debate knows how difficult that is. Caribbean and African nations do not always agree on modalities and priorities. Diaspora communities in Europe and North America have their own perspectives that do not always align neatly with state-level advocacy. Building a genuinely common front across continents, generations, and political traditions is a generational project, not a three-day conference.

None of this diminishes what was achieved. But it is important to make this clear: Accra was a beginning, not an end. The measure of this conference will be what happens in the twelve months before the next one.

What This Means for the Next Generation

Here is what we should tell young Africans about this process, and it matters that we get this right, because they will inherit both the momentum and the responsibility.

For the first time in history, the international community has named what happened to African peoples as a legal category of harm, not just a moral stain. For the first time, the question of repair has moved from the margins of international diplomacy to its centre. For the first time, countries that enriched themselves through slavery are sitting in the same room, voluntarily, at their own initiative,  to discuss what they owe. That is new. It has never happened before at this scale.

The Accra Commitments also do something quietly radical: they insist that reparatory justice must include the meaningful participation of young people in the design, implementation, and monitoring of all processes. This is not decorative language. It is a recognition that reparatory justice is not a transaction to be settled between current generations and then filed away. It is,  as the document puts it, a multi-generational and inter-generational project. The next generation is not inheriting a solved problem. They are inheriting an ongoing negotiation with the power to shape it.

The African Union’s designation of 2026–2035 as the Decade of Justice for Africans and People of African Descent gives the agenda a ten-year institutional home. The UN’s Second International Decade for People of African Descent (2025–2034) runs alongside it. These overlapping frameworks mean that what was decided in Accra this week does not expire when the delegates go home. It has a calendar, an architecture, and a review mechanism.

A Continent That Led, Not Followed

It is worth stepping back to appreciate the geopolitical meaning of what Ghana did this week. At a moment when African nations are often portrayed in global media as recipients of aid, subjects of debt negotiations, or bystanders to decisions made elsewhere, Ghana convened the world on a matter of global justice, and the world came. Presidents, prime ministers, foreign ministers, representatives of the African Union and the Caribbean, legal scholars, and civil society leaders from every region. They came to Accra. They sat in the rooms Ghana prepared. They debated on the terms that President Mahama, the African Union Champion, set. And they adopted the Accra Next Steps Commitments.

What Comes Next

The path from Accra is clearer than it has ever been, even if it remains long. The three new global panels will begin building the legal and evidentiary record. The annual conference structure will sustain political accountability. The UN pathway will carry the Accra Commitments into the General Assembly and its subsidiary bodies. The African Union’s Decade of Action will keep reparatory justice at the heart of continental policymaking.

But the most important work will happen outside conference rooms. It will happen when African governments integrate reparatory justice into their national development strategies, not as an add-on but as a framework. It will happen when African universities lead the research that fills the knowledge gaps about our own history. It will happen when African civil society holds its own governments accountable for implementing the Accra Commitments, it will happen when young Africans in Lagos, Nairobi, Accra, Dakar, Bridgetown, London, New York, and São Paulo, etc., understand that they are not asking for sympathy. They are asserting a right. That is the real next step.

The time has come to restore, to remember, to reform.

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