THE AFRICA CEO FORUM

🌍 A few weeks on from Kigali, one conviction voiced at the AFRICA CEO FORUM Annual Summit still resonates: the continent already holds much of what it needs to finance its own transformation.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Summit, José de Lima Massano, Minister of State for Economic Coordination of Angola and former Governor of the country's central bank, turned the familiar question of African development on its head. Rather than asking who will fund the continent's infrastructure, he pointed to the resources Africa already commands, its combined international reserves, too often parked in financial institutions abroad while domestic needs go unanswered. The same logic, he argued, applies to how economies remain structured, still geared towards exporting raw materials rather than capturing value at home.

💡 His conclusion was a call to responsibility rather than to aid:
"It rests on us to introduce the changes that the continent demands."
This is the heart of what Kigali set out to debate: shared ownership is not a slogan but a strategy, and financial sovereignty begins with the decisions Africans take for themselves.

📌 The full conversations from Kigali are available in replay: https://youtu.be/GKr4cYzDHyQ

🎯 A few weeks on from Kigali, one reflection still holds its weight. Serge EKUE, President of the Banque Ouest Africaine de Développement (BOAD), distilled in a handful of sentences the equation that will define Africa's coming decade.

📊 The ingredients are already in place, he observed. A high level of growth, almost a given at this point. The youngest population on the planet. Combine that growth, that demographic energy, and the capital Africa now needs, and the continent can move ahead of the curve. But there lies the challenge. Being ahead of the curve is not a birthright. It is earned through responsibility, through technical rigour, through a clear vision, and above all through a sense of ex*****on.

🌍 Coming from the man who has led BOAD since 2020, the words carry the authority of someone who turns vision into balance sheets every day. Across the eight WAEMU states, the bank he steers is precisely where growth, youth and capital have to meet, where the Djoliba strategy channels billions into the infrastructure, energy and private-sector projects that decide whether potential becomes performance. A former Natixis markets leader in London and Hong Kong, Ekué brought to Kigali the rare blend of global financial fluency and continental conviction.

✨ That is why the remark resonates still. Because it named, without fanfare, the one variable that separates Africa's promise from its delivery.

Not growth, not demographics, not even capital: Ex*****on.
The very discipline this year's "Scale or Fail" theme was built to demand.

🎙️ 'The private sector is the engine of growth.' Now that Angola has been chosen to host the continent's financial industry, José de Lima Massano's case for investment reads differently.

📈 Speaking as Angola's Minister of State for Economic Coordination, Massano sets out the reasoning behind the country's reform programme. The state is stepping back from running companies where private operators can deliver, instead focusing on the policy conditions that allow businesses to grow. He points to the privatisation of more than a hundred state holdings and the steady increase in non-oil activity as results.

🌍 That argument now has a platform. Luanda will host AFIS 2026 on 3 and 4 November — the first edition to be held in Southern Africa and the first in a Lusophone country. For the seventh-largest economy on the continent, winning the right to host the summit is precisely what Massano describes in his remarks on the selection: a sign of international confidence in Angola's chosen path.

🤝 The summit brings together the people who allocate capital across Africa with the regulators and operators who shape the markets they support. For an economy that is openly courting private investment, it is hard to imagine a more important audience.

🎟️ Massano framed his closing remarks as an open invitation to investors to participate in Angola's development. AFIS 2026 is where that invitation is given a date and an address.

🔗 Registrations are open. Secure your place in Luanda: https://jaf-fis.mediactive-events.com/index.php?langue_id=2

🏆 Some evenings stay with you long after the lights come down, and the ACF Awards gala was one of them, a night when the continent gathered to celebrate the builders, the financiers and the visionaries who are writing Africa's next economic chapter.

🌍 Behind every trophy lifted that evening was a story of conviction, of leaders who chose to back African markets with African capital and to prove that scale is not an ambition borrowed from elsewhere but a promise the continent is keeping for itself.

✨ To everyone who walked away with an award, and to all those whose work made the shortlist possible, this recognition belongs to you, and it belongs to the millions whose futures are being shaped by the projects, partnerships and bold bets you championed.

💫 Looking back at these images, the pride is still palpable, and so is the reminder that the real reward was never the trophy itself but the movement it represents, a generation of African champions determined to own their growth and to share it.

🎯 A few weeks on from Kigali, one voice still lingers. Philippe Labonne, President of Africa Global Logistics, caught on the sidelines of the Forum, setting out in just a few sentences the equation Africa now has to answer.

🚢 The diagnosis is settled, he argued. The challenge is no longer up for debate. It is one of ex*****on, and it goes by a single name: scaling up. Building comprehensive solutions rather than piecemeal fixes. Extending the continent's logistics footprint to bring world-class standards within reach of African businesses. And letting Africa, at long last, deliver on its full potential.

🌍 Three sentences, and the whole of Africa's industrial challenge sat inside the same equation. Without logistics infrastructure at scale, there is no working AfCFTA. Without integrated corridors, there are no value chains capable of turning raw resource wealth into local value. Without network density, there is no credible industrialisation. Logistics is no longer the back office of African growth. It is the backbone of it.

✨ That is why the remark still resonates weeks later. Because it said, plainly, what the 2026 edition of the Forum set out to champion with ambition: Scale or Fail.

🌍 Day 2 in Kigali brought to a close, and with it, two days that have redrawn the lines of Africa's economic conversation.

📆 What began on Thursday as a question of scale ended on Friday as a working agenda. Across megaprojects, finance, productivity and the eight value chains that anchor the continent's industrial future, two thousand decision-makers spent the day pressing past panels and into commitments, past diagnostics and into the architecture of who builds what, with whose capital, on whose terms.

🔥 The closing day refused the easy exits. On stage and in the corridors, the conversations turned harder and more specific, on African banks and the credit they are still not deploying, on family offices and the wealth that is still not circulating, on the start-up scene and the consolidation it can no longer avoid, on the energy mix that will or will not power the continent's industrial leap.

🎤 The voices that closed the forum picked up where the opening sequence left off, holding the line on African Ownership and turning continental ambition into the language of ex*****on.

🎬 The day, in two minutes.

👉 The conversations don't end in Kigali. Follow the Africa CEO Forum to stay close to what comes next!

🌍 Stop exporting raw materials. Start transforming on the continent. From the main stage of the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit in Kigali, Gagan Gupta, Founder of ARISE Group, Equitane, A2MP and Spiro, laid out the operating doctrine behind one of Africa's most ambitious industrialisation portfolios.

🏭 The starting point was Gabon. The country was exporting round logs. ARISE set up a special economic zone designed to transform the wood domestically, structured as a 60/40 public-private partnership with the Gabonese state taking the larger stake. The model worked, and it has since been replicated by governments across the continent. Gupta's read of why it spread is striking. The battle in Africa, he argued, is mostly in the mind. Show that transformation is possible in one country, and the rest follow.

⛏️ The same logic now drives metal processing. 85% of Guinea's bauxite still ships out raw. 60 to 70% of African manganese leaves the continent untransformed. A2MP, in partnership with the Gabonese government, will bring the country's first smelter online this September. It is a structural shift that should have happened decades ago.

🛵 Spiro takes the same playbook into mobility and energy transition. Gupta sees the next five years as the biggest energy transition Africa will undergo. The Chinese reference point is instructive. Electric motorcycle pe*******on in China went from near zero in the early 2010s to virtually universal today, with combustion vehicles now a luxury in Shanghai. Africa is heading the same way, faster than most expect, because no government can sustainably subsidise fuel or foreign exchange indefinitely. Spiro is creating the demand that pulls cell and battery manufacturing onto the continent, rather than waiting for it.

🤝 The thread across all three businesses is the same. Deep public-private partnerships with governments holding 30 to 40% stakes, not symbolic 5 to 10% positions. Skin in the game on both sides. That, in Gupta's experience, is what makes industrial transformation actually move from PowerPoint to production line.

🌍 30 years on the continent, 70% of the business done with African SMEs. From the main stage of the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit in Kigali, Jean-Pascal Tricoire, Chairman of Schneider Electric, shared what scaling actually looks like when an industrial giant takes local partnership seriously.

⚡ Tricoire's starting point is non-negotiable. Energy is the foundation of every form of scaling. No urbanisation, no industrialisation, no digitisation, no AI without it. Two acceleration factors then shape Schneider's African strategy. First, digitisation and AI, which themselves consume vast amounts of energy. Second, industrial localisation — producing locally on the continent rather than importing finished goods.

🏗️ Schneider still delivers large flagship projects across Africa, including smart grids in Egypt and Senegal, work with major refineries and data centre infrastructure. But the real model has shifted. Today, 70% of the group's business is run with the small and medium enterprises that take Schneider's core technologies — drawings, IP, control systems, digital twins — and build their own applications, their own innovation and their own scale on top.

🤝 Tricoire's framing is striking in its candour. Schneider provides the technical foundation. African SMEs deliver 90% of the value on top of it. The unlock for the continent, he argued, is precisely this kind of complementarity. International majors bringing what they are excellent at, local entrepreneurs bringing field knowledge and brilliant ideas, and the combination producing scale neither could deliver alone.