THE AFRICA CEO FORUM

🌍 Fifty-four countries, forty-two currencies, and a patchwork of regulatory frameworks so dense that a product built for Lagos rarely travels cleanly to Nairobi or Accra without a costly rebuild. That is the reality Jyoti Ball, General Manager for Sub-Saharan Africa at AWS, laid out plainly when we sat down with her at the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit.

💬 "There are 54 countries in Africa, there are 42 currencies," she told us, unpacking why fragmentation remains the single hardest barrier facing African startups trying to scale beyond their home market.

🔑 What struck us most was not the diagnosis but the prescription. Jyoti Ball walked us through how founders need to rethink their approach from day one, designing for cost before scale becomes a burden, treating talent as core infrastructure rather than an afterthought, and building products with the whole continent in mind rather than a single market. Each idea reframes what building for Africa should really mean in an environment shaped by currency multiplicity, regulatory divergence, and a cloud economics model that is finally within reach of early-stage teams.

🎥 The full conversation goes further into how Amazon Web Services (AWS) is backing that shift. Watch it here: https://youtu.be/8uQ7F-a1zFM

🌍 Throwback Thursday: from the Kigali Summit panel exploring whether Africa can scale its intelligent industry at speed while retaining control.

Amid discussions of digital twins, smart ports and AI-driven manufacturing, Kola Karim, Executive Chairman of Shoreline Energy Group, pulled the conversation back to a more fundamental question, one that underpins every ambition Africa holds for its industrial future.

⚡ "What is the energy mix strategy of this continent?" he asked, arguing that Africa cannot simply import the renewables-only playbook written for economies that spent a century burning coal to build theirs.

For Kola Karim, the continent's path runs through natural gas, hydropower reserves such as the Grand Inga, and above all the capital required to turn resources into infrastructure. Per capita power consumption on the continent remains among the lowest in the world, and closing that gap, he argued, matters more than committing to a single energy source on principle.

🔑 A reminder that scale, ownership and productivity, the themes running through this year's Summit, all rest on the same foundation: energy Africa can generate, finance and control on its own terms.

🍿 Watch the full session on https://youtu.be/9TwRiU3PHfc

🔦 Follow Friday shines a light on Ben Hassan Ouattara, Head of Africa at Puma Energy, whose remarks at Africa CEO Forum cut through the noise on what an African energy transition actually requires.

⚡ His argument was refreshingly unromantic. Before the continent can talk about switching energy sources, it has to solve access first, since Ouattara's own downstream business exists precisely to move fuel where people and industry need it.

💬 As he put it, "the issue is not about changing energy overnight, it's about moving those energies right." Only once that access is secured does the gradual work of cutting emissions and locking in long-term supply security make sense, built on pragmatic, localised solutions rather than a single continental blueprint.

🌍 That pragmatism has been sharpened by recent shocks. Ben Hassan Ouattara pointed to the latest geopolitical turmoil in the Middle East as a wake-up call for African infrastructure, arguing that ports, storage and distribution capacity, not policy statements, will determine whether goods and energy actually move across the continent. For a downstream operator, that is not theory. It is the daily test of keeping Africa's supply chains resilient.

💡 A useful reminder that infrastructure, not ideology, is Africa's real energy transition bottleneck.

🎬 Full interview on youtube: https://youtu.be/IZnY9h4TG6M

💬 "That's completely irrational."

- Aryann Gupta, Executive Director at A2MP | Africa Minerals and Metals Processing Platform

🏗️ Africa produces 85% of the world's seaborne bauxite. Yet not a single functioning aluminium refinery operates on the continent.

⛏️ Africa produces 75% of the world's manganese. Yet not a single smelting facility exists.

💬 For Aryann Gupta, Executive Director at A2MP, these numbers aren't a talking point. They're the reason his company exists.

🌍 For over a hundred years, every mining major operating in Africa has made the same decision: extract, ship, process elsewhere. A2MP, the Africa Minerals and Metals Processing Platform, was built to reverse that logic, not by preaching that transformation should happen close to the mine, but by building it.

🏭 The proof is already on the ground. In Cameroon, A2MP operates a manganese mine producing around 2 million tonnes a year. In Q4 2026, it will inaugurate the largest ferroalloy smelter on the continent.

🔋 This is the conversation at the heart of the Mineral-Power Nexus session at : how Africa's next generation of mining projects are being designed not as isolated export sites, but as system assets anchoring regional industrial development, from the Zambia-DRC battery corridor backed by the $3.5 billion Lobito project, to First Quantum's 430 MW renewables build-out on the copper belt, to Namibia's green hydrogen ambitions.

❓ The hard question remains: who moves first, and who absorbs the early risk, to make this integration bankable?

▶️ Watch the full session : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s4CjeJYzMGg

🌍 "If there is no water, you have no harvest."

FlashBack to Kigali, where Max Müller, Senior Vice President and Head of Global Public Affairs at Bayer, made the case that on this continent sustainability is not an abstract goal but a question of survival.

His argument was direct. Climate change is hitting the global south harder and faster than northern Europe, and for millions of farmers a failing irrigation system or a missing rainy season is not an inconvenience, it is a matter of life and death. Without sustainability, he argued, there is simply no future to plan for.

🤝 His answer was collaboration. No two African countries carry the same strengths, but when they pool them the impact multiplies, and food security stops being a national struggle and becomes a shared, continental one.

🌱 He grounded it in something concrete. Bayer's maize seed facility in Zambia is built to reach up to 10 million smallholder farmers by 2030, from a single site, with an impact that spills across several countries at once. It is a reminder that one well placed investment, paired with the right partnerships, can ripple far beyond its own borders.

In a year defined by the scale imperative, it was a vivid illustration of what shared ownership of Africa's food future could actually look like.

👇 Full session in the first comment.

🚁 Throwback to Kigali, and to one of the boldest answers heard during the healthcare session of the Annual Summit.The panel asked whether African healthcare access is on the cusp of a revolution. Caitlin Burton, CEO of Zipline Africa, chose to answer with numbers rather than promises.

📉 By managing Rwanda's national blood supply from the air, Zipline has helped cut maternal mortality by 51%. Delivering vaccines, medicines and nutrition on demand, wherever a health worker happens to be, has turned drone logistics from a pilot project into something governments now treat as public infrastructure, financed out of national budgets.

🌍 That model is already running in Rwanda, Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire, Kenya and Nigeria, with contracts set to reach hundreds of millions of people. A community health worker with no building and no fridge can now deliver primary care where people actually live, which quietly rewrites what universal access really means.Her most striking point was about what comes next, the moment when population health data will reveal, in her own words, "a before Zipline and an after Zipline shift."It is a reminder that the revolution in African healthcare may not arrive as a single breakthrough, but as a system that finally reaches the last mile.

🎥 Rewatch the full session here: https://youtu.be/VBI30gfM8lc

💡 "Investing in research and innovation is becoming more and more important."

Throwback to Kigali and the "Invest in Morocco" session, where Khalid Baddou, Chief Institutional Affairs Officer at UM6P - University Mohammed VI Polytechnic, reframed the entire investment conversation.

His point was refreshingly direct. Infrastructure matters and it is genuinely transformative, but on its own it is not enough, because the real multiplier sits in talent, research and knowledge.

🇲🇦 To make the case, he traced the story of OCP Group. Two decades ago it was a state-owned business worth around two billion dollars, built largely on exporting raw phosphate rock, Morocco's main natural resource. When a new management team took over in 2006, it set out to rewrite that model, shifting from selling the rock abroad towards transforming it at home and supplying farmers across Morocco and the continent directly.

🎓 One lever proved decisive, and that lever was knowledge. What began as a corporate university built around OCP's own needs grew into UM6P, a full-fledged institution now serving Morocco and the wider African continent.

It is a reminder that value addition is never only an industrial choice, it is an educational one too, and that sovereignty over your resources begins with sovereignty over your skills.

🎥 Watch the full session here: https://youtu.be/QPLNGNU4XnA

🚢 Throwback to Kigali and the "Blue Corridors" panel, where Diane Karusisi, CEO of Bank of Kigali Plc, made a striking case: a landlocked country can still engineer its way out of its own geography.Rwanda cannot move the sea closer, and its trade still runs through the ports of Mombasa and Dar es Salaam. So, as she explained, the country focused on everything that was within its control, injecting efficiency and coordination into its own logistics chain rather than lamenting the map.

📦 The results are hard to argue with. By digitising trade and building one-stop border posts where customs, standards bodies, banks and every relevant agency work side by side, Rwanda has cut the transit time for cleared goods from 14 days a few years ago to just 3 days today. Same geography, radically different outcome
🏗️ She also pointed to the dry port near Kigali, developed with DP World, which now handles containers bound for the markets of eastern DRC. Cargo flows through Kigali, business flows to the operator, and jobs flow to Rwandans, a neat illustration of how a logistics hub turns a constraint into an advantage.Her line said it best: "geography is not destiny." For African trade, friction, far more than distance, is often the real cost.

🎥 Watch the full session here: https://youtu.be/Pelz4MLNm9w

✈️ We sat down with Dorothea von Boxberg, CEO of Brussels Airlines, at the Annual Summit in Kigali, to tackle a question the aviation industry still finds uncomfortable: where are the women in leadership?

She anchored her answer in a concrete benchmark. Through IATA, the International Air Transport Association, the sector set itself a target known as 25 by 25, the ambition that by 2025 a quarter of all leadership positions in aviation would be held by women. Many airlines signed up, the Lufthansa Group among them, and Brussels Airlines stepped up to reach that threshold.

🚺 What made her stand out was her refusal to declare the job done. "Is 25% enough? No, I think it should be higher over time," she said, while insisting that these initiatives genuinely move the needle. A target, in her view, is a floor to build on, not a finish line to celebrate.

Her prescription was refreshingly practical, built on mentoring, on actively seeking out the best talent whether male or female, and on making sure everyone in the company has a real path to a meaningful career. The industry has come a long way, she acknowledged, but there is still a great deal left to do, and real potential waiting to be unlocked.

A reminder that diversity targets only matter when they translate into everyday leadership habits.

📢 SAVE THE DATE - Abidjan, 3 & 4 May 2027 🗓️

Abidjan will host the 2027 edition of the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit. A new chapter for the continent’s leading private sector gathering. One stage. Africa’s decision-makers, investors, and business leaders, alongside global partners.

Full programme coming soon...