The Africa Finance Corporation (AFC) is convening the continent’s top infrastructure investors, fund managers, and industry leaders in Nairobi, Kenya, for an inaugural summit designed to channel Africa’s existing but underdeployed domestic capital into bankable industrial and infrastructure projects at scale.
The Africa We Build Summit will take place on April 23 and 24, 2026, hosted by the AFC in partnership with the Government of Kenya, under the theme “Infrastructure as the Engine of Industrialisation.” Kenya’s President Dr. William Samoei Ruto will deliver the keynote address.
The summit’s central argument that Africa does not lack capital but lacks the mechanisms to deploy it productively has been articulated by AFC President and Chief Executive Officer Samaila Zubairu, who said ahead of the event that the opportunity is to channel that capital into infrastructure and industry at scale, turning resources into productivity, jobs, and long-term prosperity.
AFC’s Head of Capital Markets, Funding and Investor Relations Modupe Famakinwa has previously estimated that Africa holds approximately US$4 trillion in investable capital, a large portion of which sits in pension funds, but continues to flow out of the continent rather than being recycled into domestic infrastructure and industrial projects.
Sessions at the Nairobi summit will cover regional corridor investments, rail and port network expansion, cross-border energy systems, and strategic minerals value chains, with a deliberate emphasis on value addition over raw extraction. The East African Community’s Northern Corridor, linking the Port of Mombasa to Uganda, Rwanda, eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), and South Sudan, will receive focused attention alongside the broader East African Railway Master Plan.
The Lobito Corridor and the Kenya National Infrastructure Fund will be highlighted as models of what is achievable when capital, policy, and bankable projects are aligned into integrated economic ecosystems.
The summit will also see the launch of the State of Africa’s Infrastructure Report 2026, described as the most comprehensive assessment to date of the continent’s cross-continental investment gaps, capital flows, and project pipelines.
Ghana’s Minister for Lands and Natural Resources Emmanuel Armah Kofi Buah held strategic discussions with Zubairu on the sidelines of the Investing in Africa Mining Indaba 2026 in Cape Town in February, centred on financing priority projects in bauxite, gold, and iron ore and aligning investment with Ghana’s industrialisation agenda. Those discussions sit squarely within the agenda the Nairobi summit is designed to advance. AFC has 48 member countries and has invested over US$19 billion across 36 African countries since its establishment in 2007.
