Emmanuel Macron and William Ruto opened the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi on Monday, drawing more than 30 African heads of state and an estimated 4,000 delegates from multilateral institutions, the private sector and academia to a two-day session focused on energy transition, green industrialisation and reform of the global financial architecture.
Bola Tinubu, the Nigerian president, landed at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport at around 12:15 a.m. local time on board the presidential aircraft, marking the second leg of a three-nation tour that began in Paris and will continue to Kigali for the Africa CEO Forum on May 14–15. Tinubu is scheduled to hold bilateral meetings with several African counterparts on the margins.
The summit's formal agenda runs over four panels — energy transition, digital transformation, green industrialisation and reform of the global financial system — alongside a "private sector dialogue" track that has drawn chief executives from Total, Orange, EDF and several Kenyan industrial groups. Co-hosts billed the format as a successor to Macron's 2023 Paris summit for a New Global Financing Pact.
Ruto, in opening remarks at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre, called for a "fundamental shift" in how the World Bank and the IMF lend to African economies. He said the gap between sovereign-borrowing rates for advanced and African economies — currently around 7 percentage points — was "a structural unfairness that no longer reflects credit risk".
Macron, framing his second presidential term around what he calls "a French-African partnership of equals", proposed an enlarged French-led credit guarantee facility for clean-energy projects on the continent. France's development agency AFD has committed €1.1 billion to the initial tranche; Kenya, Rwanda, Senegal and Côte d'Ivoire are expected to be the early signatories.
Notably absent from the Nairobi gathering are the leaders of Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger — the three Sahelian states that have severed defence ties with Paris over the past three years — and the South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, who is occupied with a domestic political crisis. The summit's organisers have downplayed both absences.
The closing session on Tuesday afternoon is expected to deliver a "Nairobi Declaration" focused on multilateral lender reform and a joint position on COP31, due in Brazil in November. African finance ministers will hold a closed-door breakfast on Tuesday morning ahead of the document's adoption.