Independence: The Auda-Nepad steering committee, which met in May 2026, affirmed the principle that Africa must accelerate transformation and self-reliance. Photo: Auda-Nepad
Africa’s development cannot be willed into existence by any single actor. Not by governments alone, not by markets alone and not by donors alone.
That was the founding insight of the African leadership that gave us the New Partnership for Africa’s Development in 2001. It remains the operative principle as Nepad marks 25 years in 2026.
The Thabo Mbeki Foundation’s High-Level Business Breakfast on Thursday, 21 May 2026, was a working conversation about the partnerships the next phase of African renewal will require: between African states, between African and global actors and between state and non-state institutions on the continent.
The African renaissance cannot be financed by sentiment and it cannot be delivered by governments working in isolation.
When presidents Mbeki, Olusegun Obasanjo (Nigeria), Abdoulaye Wade (Senegal), Abdelaziz Bouteflika (Algeria) and Hosni Mubarak (Egypt) shaped the framework that became Nepad, partnership was not a slogan attached to a policy. It was the policy.
The plan rested on three interlocking commitments: African ownership of African development; regional integration as the route to scale; and continental renewal anchored in mutual accountability between African states and their global partners.
African ownership meant the agenda would be set in Addis Ababa and Abuja, not in Washington or Brussels.
Regional integration meant the small size of individual African economies would be overcome through coordinated infrastructure and connected markets.
Continental renewal meant Africa would rebuild its institutions and productive base on terms of partnership rather than dependency.
Twenty-five years on, that architecture remains correct. What has shifted is the urgency to act on it.
The African Union Development Agency carries the implementation mandate. Through the Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa, Auda-Nepad’s 2025 annual report noted that more than 50 regional projects were assessed for maturity and 24 moved towards bankability.
Yet Africa moves too slowly from adoption to implementation. Regional projects are held back by weak preparation, regulatory fragmentation, limited domestic capital and uneven state capacity.
Africa exports raw value and imports finished dependency.
The partnerships Nepad anticipated have too often defaulted into older patterns of conditionality and aid rather than co-investment and co-production. Above all, the agenda has suffered from the absence of political leadership for whom the development of the entire continent is the central preoccupation.
A continental programme of this scale cannot succeed without champions in the state houses themselves.
Nowhere is the partnership question sharper than in financing.
The African Development Bank’s 2025 annual meetings platform stated that Africa needs more than $1.3 trillion to achieve the sustainable development goals, $68 billion to $108bn annually for infrastructure, and more than $242bn annually for climate financing until 2050.
Globally, the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the UN Department of Economic and Social Affairs estimate the annual Sustainable Development Goal financing gap for developing countries sat at between $4 trillion and $4.3 trillion, more than a 50% increase over pre-pandemic estimates. These are not numbers any single category of actor can close. African budgets cannot close them alone.
Official development assistance from Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries, even at its 2022 record of $211bn, cannot close them alone. Private capital cannot close them without credible regulation, efficient tax regimes, prepared projects and risk-sharing instruments.
What is required is structured partnership of the kind Nepad envisaged: between African governments and global capital markets; between multilateral development banks and African pension and sovereign wealth funds; between OECD donors moving towards the 0.7% of gross national income target and African states honouring their own domestic resource mobilisation commitments; and on African soil, between the state and the non-state actors who together constitute the productive and civic capacity of the continent.
Public-private partnership is sometimes spoken of as an accounting technique for getting infrastructure off government balance sheets.
That is a poor reading. At its best, it is the practical expression of a shared developmental responsibility. The state sets the framework and convenes. A capable developmental state, guided by a professional civil service, carries the central work of coordination, with the lifting of millions of Africans out of poverty and lives of indignity as its overriding objective. Business brings capital, execution capacity and operational discipline. Civil society contributes scrutiny, distribution networks and moral authority. None of the actors can substitute for the others. We learnt this in practice.
In March 2020, as Covid-19 began to threaten South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced the Solidarity Fund, an independent public benefit organisation designed to unite government, business, labour and civil society in a single national response. I was asked to serve as its founding chairperson. Within days, the fund had moved from concept to operation. Government seeded the effort with R150 million. By the time the fund published its first interim impact report in late 2020, it had mobilised more than R3.1bn from more than 304 000 donors.
The Solidarity Fund did not solve the pandemic. What it did was demonstrate that when a clear common purpose is defined, when governance is independent and transparent and when each actor contributes from its comparative strength, public-private partnership can mobilise resources at a pace no single sector could manage alone. We do not need to invent the principle.
The continental crises make the argument concrete.
The International Energy Agency reported in 2025 that almost 600 million people in Africa lacked access to electricity. The African Continental Free Trade Area, which the World Bank estimates could raise incomes by 9% and create 18 million jobs by 2035, depends on ports, customs and payment systems that must work in concert.
The Kampala CAADP Strategy and Action Plan for 2026 to 2035 aims to mobilise $100bn, lift agrifood output by 45% and triple intra-African trade in farm goods.
The African Union target is for the continent to produce more than 60% of the vaccines it needs locally by 2040, against current production of around 1%.
Each is a partnership agenda. None is a public sector agenda or a private sector agenda alone.
Africa’s development programme requires a cohesive, multipronged approach. We must build a continental project pipeline that transforms ideas into bankable investments while mobilising domestic pension funds, sovereign wealth funds and development investment institutions to invest locally.
Furthermore, by harmonising regulatory frameworks, we can overcome the fragmentation that hinders scale. The initiative must integrate trade policy with industrial development, skills, energy and logistics, supported by credible risk-sharing instruments that attract global capital without compromising African ownership.
Business has a direct role. We attended the High-Level Business Breakfast as co-authors of the continent’s next delivery compact, alongside development finance institutions willing to absorb risk, civil society partners who can hold the work accountable and governments that understand investment follows credible rules.
The founders of Nepad understood this. Twenty-five years ago they argued that African ownership, regional integration and continental renewal were a single project, carried by a coalition broad enough to include African states, African business, African civil society and Africa’s global partners. That argument has not aged. It has matured.
The next 25 years must move from frameworks to action. Our call as a foundation is to a new generation of thinkers and practitioners who will take this legacy as a platform from which to carry Africa’s development forward.
We will do this together or we will not do it.
Gloria Serobe is a trustee of the Thabo Mbeki Foundation.