Africa’s geopolitical leverage is usually measured in terms of natural resources and strategic location. The continent has critical minerals, an expanding market and important sea lanes. Yet one of its most consequential but less frequently highlighted assets is the collective power of its people, comprising 1.5 billion people, 55 states, and a far-flung diaspora.
Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui captured this wider constituency through his concept of “Global Africa”, extending the idea of Africa beyond the continent to encompass its diasporas across the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and Asia. The continent’s diaspora encompasses 350 million people of African descent. Global Africa therefore represents a demographic, economic and diplomatic constituency of 1.85 billion people. Its collective weight is formidable but much of that potential remains fragmented and underused.
This collective power becomes more important as external powers compete for influence, markets and strategic access across Africa. China promotes infrastructure connectivity through its Belt and Road Initiative, while the United States has backed the Lobito Corridor railway linking Angola, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Zambia. The European Union aims to mobilise €150 billion (R2.8 trillion) for Africa through its Global Gateway investment package. Russia has also expanded its security presence on the continent, especially in Libya, the Sahel countries and the Central African Republic, while Turkey and the Gulf states have deepened their military and commercial ties across the Sahel, the Horn of Africa and North Africa.
In this context, Africa’s diplomatic weight becomes increasingly valuable as competition among external powers creates greater leverage for African states, acting collectively, to bargain over the terms of their engagement and turn geopolitical attention into tangible gains.
Diplomatic weight
The United Nations has 193 member states, each holding one vote in the General Assembly; 54 belong to the African Group: 28% of the membership, while Africa and the Caribbean make up 36% of the UN General Assembly. In the UN Security Council, the three elected African members, collectively known as the A3, coordinate their positions and have worked with a Caribbean member (Saint Vincent and the Grenadines) as the A3+1 in 2020-2021 and (Guyana) as the A3 Plus in 2024-2025. Africa’s 45 members in the World Trade Organisation represent more than a quarter of the institution’s 166 members.
These numbers gain strategic value when governments organise around clear interests, build coalitions and sustain engagement throughout negotiations. “Underpricing” means the gap between the diplomatic assets Africa and its diaspora possess and the influence they derive from the deployment of such assets.
The emerging UN Framework Convention on International Tax Cooperation offers an example of the successful use of Africa’s diplomatic leverage. In November 2023, the UN General Assembly approved a Nigerian-led Africa Group resolution to shift global tax rule-making to the world body. Similarly, in March 2026, the Assembly adopted a historic, Ghanaian-led resolution declaring the transatlantic trade in enslaved Africans and racialised chattel enslavement as “the gravest crime against humanity”.
Strongly backed by a strategic alliance between the African Union (AU) and Caribbean states, these two diplomatic milestones demonstrate how Africa can convert its numerical strength into significant outcomes in global diplomacy. Yet sustaining such alliances remains difficult amid competing national interests and persistent domestic political and economic weaknesses.
Power abroad begins at home
Projecting power on the world stage requires stability at home. Governments carrying heavy debts — collectively totaling $1.2 trillion (R20 trillion) across Africa — managing fragile institutions or struggling to maintain domestic security have less space to manoeuvre internationally. Africa’s diplomatic influence therefore depends partly on the political and economic foundations from which its governments negotiate.
Countries historically expected to provide continental leadership illustrate the problem. South Africa remains one of Africa’s strongest diplomatic actors but more than a decade of weak growth, an unemployment rate above 30% and internal security concerns, including illegal mining in Gauteng and gang violence in the Eastern Cape, have limited its power projection abroad. Nigeria, another long-standing continental heavyweight, continues to grapple with a poverty rate around 63%, infrastructure gaps and internal security pressures, especially Islamist insurgency in the country’s North-East. Continental leadership becomes more difficult when the states expected to provide it are contending with serious pressures at home.
The need for internal structural resilience extends beyond states. The AU describes the African diaspora as the continent’s “sixth region”, recognising people of African descent outside the continent as participants in Africa’s development.
The economic weight of the group is considerable. Remittances to Africa reached $124.2 billion in 2025, compared to the $29 billion in bilateral aid provided by donors to Africa in the same year. While remittances largely support households, their scale nevertheless reveals that considerable African resources circulate through networks beyond the continent. More effective diaspora investment, knowledge exchange, professional networks and political advocacy could therefore strengthen domestic economies and widen the base from which African governments exercise external influence.
Challenges of Global Africa
Ali Mazrui’s concept of “Global Africa” and the AU’s designation of the African diaspora as the sixth region offer a useful way of seeing the continent’s reach. Diplomatically, Global Africa enlarges the coalition available to African states. The challenge is organisation — a concern since independence.
At the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in 1963, Ghana’s visionary leader, Kwame Nkrumah, argued that independent African states would remain vulnerable if political fragmentation prevented them from acting collectively. The eventual OAU model fell well short of the political union he envisaged. The question has never disappeared.
Six decades later, 54 states still bring different economies, alliances and security priorities into international negotiations. Expecting unanimity on every major issue would be unrealistic. A more promising approach is to pursue issue-based diplomacy wherever interests genuinely converge. International taxation, debt, climate finance, agricultural subsidies and reform of multilateral institutions are potential areas of convergence. Where consensus proves impossible, smaller African coalitions can organise around particular interests before building support outward.
From presence to influence
Africa has spent decades seeking greater representation in institutions created after 1945 when much of the continent remained under colonial rule. Africa has representation in key global institutions including 54 members in the UN General Assembly as well as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank (both institutions with weighted voting), two permanent Group of Twenty (G20) seats through South Africa and the AU and three rotating positions on the UN Security Council.
While the need for greater representation remains important, the present geopolitical transition presents an opportunity to better leverage the institutional presence and numerical weight Africa possesses.
A more demanding measure of diplomatic success is whether African coordination changes negotiating texts, secures greater policy space, shifts financing arrangements or succeeds in placing African priorities on global agendas. The Nigerian-led tax convention, for example, suggests what this can look like when African states begin with a shared interest, negotiate collectively and attract support beyond the continent.
In the shifting geopolitical landscape, Africa’s diplomatic assets deserve greater attention. Its numerical weight is considerable. Global Africa further widens the potential coalition. Stronger institutions and economies at home would give that external weight firmer foundations.
The opportunity exists. Africa should decide what its diplomatic power is worth before others do.
Dr Kofi Bediako is a senior researcher/postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.