More than 2,500 executives, investors, and heads of state will gather in Kigali next week for the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit, the continent’s largest private sector gathering, as organisers frame the moment as an existential choice between continental scale and competitive irrelevance.
The Forum opens at the Kigali Convention Centre on May 14 and runs through May 15, 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 edition drew 2,800 participants from 90 countries, including more than 1,200 chief executive-level executives, 500 government officials, and 300 journalists, and the Forum has facilitated over US$1 billion in signed investment commitments across its two most recent editions.
This year’s theme, “Scale or Fail: Why Africa Must Embrace Shared Ownership,” targets a structural problem that organisers say has become increasingly acute: a continent of 54 largely inward-looking economies that individually cannot achieve the scale needed to attract and sustain global capital. The backdrop is unfavourable. Leading Asian manufacturers operate at output volumes African producers cannot individually match. Western aid budgets are contracting. Multilateral financing, while growing, remains insufficient against an infrastructure financing gap the African Development Bank (AfDB) estimates at US$68 billion to US$108 billion annually.
Three Levers for Scale
The Forum has organised its response around three pillars. On equity, it is asking whether African pension funds, which collectively manage hundreds of billions of dollars, can be redirected toward cross-border infrastructure investment. On infrastructure, it is pushing for mega-projects designed around regional rather than national needs, citing the Lobito Corridor and the Dangote Refinery as partial models. On regulatory frameworks, it wants to extend successful harmonisation models such as the Organisation for the Harmonisation of Business Law in Africa (OHADA) and the Conférence Interafricaine des Marchés d’Assurances (CIMA), and establish the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) as the default architecture for cross-border transactions.
Who Is in the Room
The speaker list carries significant political and commercial weight. Confirmed heads of state include Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, Nigeria’s Bola Tinubu, and Gabon’s Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema, with the prime ministers of Mozambique, Côte d’Ivoire, and Guinea also attending. From the multilateral institutions, IFC Managing Director Makhtar Diop, AfDB President Sidi Ould Tah, and Arab Bank for Economic Development in Africa (BADEA) President Abdullah Al-Musaibeeh will represent the financing side of the equation.
The private sector contingent includes 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 group spanning financial services, energy, industrials, and infrastructure across five sub-regions of the continent.
What Is on the Table
The two-day programme covers eight panel sessions addressing the financing requirements of Africa’s real estate sector, estimated to need US$1 trillion in capital, the strategic implications of Asian industrial overcapacity for African manufacturers, next-generation mining project design, cross-border talent deployment, and the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in African industrial development.
Nine countries will present investment pipelines in dedicated sessions: Rwanda, Morocco, Angola, Gabon, Tanzania, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, Guinea, and South Africa. Knowledge partners include BCG, McKinsey and Company, PwC, S&P Global, and GSMA.
The IFC committed a record US$71.7 billion to private companies and financial institutions in developing countries in its 2025 fiscal year, a figure that underscores the scale of institutional appetite the Forum is seeking to channel toward African opportunities.
