In an era where global capital is fragmenting and competition for investment is intensifying, forums like the Africa CEO Forum are no longer talk shops; they are transaction platforms.
- •Beneath the headline panels and high-level dialogue lies a structured marketplace for deals, where capital meets bankable projects, and conversations are engineered to convert into commitments.
- •Set to be held in Kigali, the 2026 edition reflects a broader shift in how Africa is positioning itself by moving from a recipient of capital to a co-creator of scalable, cross-border investments.
- •The theme of shared ownership is not rhetorical, it is financial architecture and the organizing logic behind the forum’s dealmaking pipeline.
The forum’s opening panel, “Scale or Fail (why Africa must embrace shared ownership),” sets the tone as a capital allocation framework rather than a philosophical debate.
Moderated by Jennifer Zabasajja and featuring institutions like the International Finance Corporation and the Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa, the discussion centers on three levers that directly shape transactions: shared equity, shared infrastructure, and shared frameworks.
These pillars define whether a project gets financed, syndicated, or abandoned. Across the programme, sessions are deliberately structured to mirror real deal bottlenecks, ranging from credit risk and project preparation to regulatory fragmentation and capital mismatches.
The diversity of capital present remains one of the forum’s strongest transaction enablers, spanning Development Finance Institutions, institutional capital, and private equity.
One of the more striking deal insights emerges from the session on gender financing, where the funding gap is framed as a capital allocation failure costing the continent an estimated $95 billion annually in lost productivity. For investors, this signals untapped deal flow, while for policymakers, it represents a structural inefficiency in financial intermediation.
Kenyan firms, despite arriving with strong fundamentals in innovation and market depth, often miss the close due to subscale ambition and weak bankability. Success for these firms depends on treating the forum as a deal room by building for institutional capital, thinking in regional corridors, and leveraging blended finance early in the structuring stage.
The prime ministerial panel underscores a final shift: African governments are moving from regulators to co-investors. The implication is profound, as deals emerging from this environment are increasingly state-aligned and strategic. At its core, the forum is solving a coordination problem by providing a platform that aligns capital and projects quickly, credibly, and at scale. For the Kenyan executive, leaving Kigali with a signed agreement requires more than a pitch; it requires a project that is investment-ready and aligned with the new continental mandate of shared regional growth.
The closing presidential panel, featuring H.E. Paul Kagame, H.E. Bola Tinubu, and H.E. Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, butresses this final shift. At its core, the forum is solving a coordination problem by providing a platform that aligns capital and projects quickly, credibly, and at scale. For the Kenyan executive, leaving Kigali with a signed agreement requires more than a pitch, it requires a project that is investment-ready and aligned with the new continental mandate of shared regional growth.
