Africa CEO Forum ‘26 pushes ‘scale or fail’ integration agenda

More than 2,500 executives, investors, and heads of state will descend on Kigali next month for the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit, the continent’s largest private sector gathering, as organisers push African business to confront what they describe as an existential choice between continental scale and competitive irrelevance.

The fourteenth edition of the Forum opens at the Kigali Convention Centre on May 14 and runs through May 15. It is co-hosted by the Rwanda Development Board and the International Finance Corporation (IFC), the private sector arm of the World Bank Group.

Last year’s summit drew 2,800 participants from 90 countries, including more than 1,200 C-suite executives, 500 government officials, and 300 journalists. The Forum has facilitated over US$1 billion in signed investment commitments across its two most recent editions alone.

This year’s theme — ‘Scale or Fail: Why Africa Must Embrace Shared Ownership’ is timely. Despite 54 largely inward-looking economies, Africa struggles to achieve the scale required to attract and sustain global capital in an increasingly size-driven global economy.

This comes as leading Asian manufacturers are operating at output levels that African producers cannot match individually and Western aid budgets are contracting.

Multilateral financing, while growing, remains insufficient against a continental infrastructure financing gap that the African Development Bank (AfDB) estimates at US$68 to 108 billion annually.

The Forum’s answer is shared ownership, structured around three pillars. On equity, it is asking whether African pension funds, which collectively manage hundreds of billions of dollars in assets, can be redirected toward cross-border infrastructure investment, building on models already being tested domestically in several markets.

On infrastructure, it is pushing for cross-border mega-projects designed around regional rather than national needs, citing the Lobito Corridor and the Dangote Refinery as partial templates. On frameworks, it wants to extend successful regional models — Organisation for the Harmonisation of Business Law in Africa (OHADA), Conférence Interafricaine des Marchés d’Assurances (CIMA) — and establish the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) as the continent’s default architecture for cross-border transactions.

The speaker list gives the debate political and commercial weight. Confirmed heads of state include Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Nigeria’s Bola Tinubu, Gabon’s Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, and the prime ministers of Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, and Guinea. IFC Managing Director, Makhtar Diop; AfDB President, Sidi Ould Tah; and the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA) President Abdullah Al-Musaibeeh will lead the multilateral contingent.

From the private sector, confirmed participants include Aliko Dangote, Abdul Samad Rabiu, Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede of Access Holdings, James Mwangi of Equity Bank, Jeremy Awori of Ecobank, and Ahmed Elsewedy of Elsewedy Electric, a roster that spans financial services, energy, industrials, and infrastructure across five sub-regions.

The two-day programme covers eight panel sessions. Topics include the financing of Africa’s real estate sector,estimated to require US$1 trillion in capital, the strategic implications of Asian industrial overcapacity for African manufacturers, next-generation mining project design, talent deployment across borders, and the role of artificial intelligence in African industrial development.

Nine countries will present investment pipelines through dedicated ‘Invest In’ sessions: Rwanda, Morocco, Angola, Gabon, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Guinea, and South Africa. Knowledge partners include BCG, McKinsey & Company, PwC, S&P Global, and GSMA. Diamond sponsors include APM Terminals, BUA Group, OCP, Orange, and NNPC.

IFC committed a record US$71.7 billion to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries in fiscal year 2025.

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