A word from the founder

When we launched the Africa Political Outlook in 2023, our vision was clear and our ambition uncompromising: to offer the world an alternative platform where political leaders rub shoulders with captains of industry, where researchers dialogue with young leaders, and where NGOs and institutions find common ground with global partners to redraw together the contours of the future of Africa and the planet. Our ambition was, and remains, to create a space where strong ideas become levers for action, and where the boundaries between reflection and implementation disappear, where the relationship between Africa and the world is transformed in a structuring way.

Today, this ambition resonates with renewed force. As history accelerates and the tectonic plates of global geopolitics shift and realign before our very eyes, Africa stands out as the beating heart of the "Giant South", writing a new page in a reformed multilateralism that is more inclusive, fairer and respectful of the sovereignty of nations.

The emergence of our continent is not a distant projection, it is a tangible reality, driven by three irrepressible forces:

• Demographic strength
  With over 60% of its population under the age of 25, Africa is not only the world's youngest continent, it is the planet's lifeblood, its future workshop and the final frontier of its growth.

• Geostrategic strength
  The continent is home to over 30% of the world's reserves of critical minerals, resources so essential to the energy transition and the new digital revolution driven by artificial intelligence.

• Economic strength
  By 2050, one in four people will be African, and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) will bring together a continental market of 1.3 billion consumers and over $3.4 trillion in wealth, driving unprecedented demand and investment.

Can we still speak of a continent on the periphery?
No. Africa is now an inevitable center of gravity, the new fulcrum of a changing world.

And where some, with a dated outlook, see fragility, we see opportunity. Where some fear instability, we affirm and believe in the intrinsic capacity of African societies to reinvent their models, courageously and unashamedly mapping out their own path to prosperity. It is this inalienable right to prosperity that guides our commitment.
More than just another summit on the international agenda, the APO is fundamentally a catalyst for transformation. Our ambition is to go beyond the fixed paradigms of development aid, inherited from a bygone world, to build genuine partnership ecosystems, based on co-creation, co-responsibility and shared dignity. Throughout the year, we mobilize heads of state and government, ministers, ambassadors, parliamentarians, business leaders, researchers and civil society players around vital issues:

• Plurilateralism and the new global dialogue spaces
  in the face of shared strategic needs.
• Food sovereignty
  because a continent that cannot feed itself is not free.
• Inclusive prosperity and growth
  to make the economy work for everyone.
• The architecture of collective security
  based not on external intervention, but on endogenous, sustainable mechanisms.
• Scientific innovation, artificial intelligence and technological inclusion
  driving tomorrow's economy.
• Culture, identity, diasporas
  so essential to building bridges between Africa and the world.

Our working groups produce not only analyses, but also concrete recommendations, which have already been incorporated into national roadmaps and multilateral debates. Our Leadership of Excellence program incubates the next generation of African and global leaders who will govern differently, with competence, courage and compassion. What's more, with our Lango platform, we are redefining the paradigms of financing emergence. Faced with an Africa that needs $200 billion in annual investment until 2030 to achieve its inclusive growth objectives, we are proposing innovative, structuring and sustainable solutions so that capital finally serves African growth, and not the other way around.

The future is not something to be suffered, but dared, given birth to and conquered. The Africa Political Outlook aims to embody this new Africa, which does not ask for a place at the world's table, but builds its own table and invites the rest of the world to join it. As Patrice Lumumba prophetically proclaimed: "Africa will write its own history, a history of glory and dignity.
This is our mission. That is our faith. And it is together, collectively - leaders, entrepreneurs, diasporas, researchers, young people - that we will transform this vision into our destiny.

Adebissi Djogan

Founder & Executive Director
Africa Political Outlook