The value of this year’s US-Africa Futures Summit was measured less in panel minutes than in the capital of relationships: the funders, organisers, policymakers and young professionals who gathered in Addis Ababa to invest time in a healthier policy ecosystem. For the first time, the summit was held on African soil, drawing African and US-based policymakers and experts from Washington, D.C., Nairobi, Dakar and other diplomatic and world capitals to talk through joint opportunities and challenges.
Sabiha Khan, Senior Advisor for Policy and Government Relations at Humanity United, describes a gathering whose most consequential work happened away from the stage. The day before the conference opened, a group of funders and organisers met to compare how each was supporting US-Africa policy, and to work out how they could back one another’s efforts through the year. The aim, as she frames it, was to create a healthy policy ecosystem in which all of their partners could thrive. In an environment where policy work depends on sustained funding and coordination, that kind of pre-summit alignment among funders is where the real infrastructure gets built.
Inside the conference, panels on peace and security, migration and Africa’s role in an emerging multipolar world filled the formal programme. Khan listened intently, but she is candid that the sidelines carried as much weight as the sessions. Recharging with strong Ethiopian coffee in the halls and at lunch tables outside the main room, she met young professionals living in Addis Ababa, heard their perspectives and reactions to the data and ideas being presented, and, in her words, most importantly expanded her community.
That exchange carried a clear return for her. She describes being grateful to be outside the exclusive rooms in which she often works in Washington, sipping coffee with someone whose perspective and experience differed richly from her own. She left those conversations energised and bubbling with ideas about bringing more people, young people and entrepreneurs among them, to the table at the next conference. For organisations operating in the policy space, widening that table is not simply a matter of inclusion; it broadens the base of insight on which future programming and investment decisions rest.
Meanwhile, the dealmaking continued after the summit itself. With many panellists and organisers still buzzing as they packed suitcases for return flights, minds fresh from examining the US-Africa relationship from all angles, the group went to breakfast in a closed-door session with the high-level diplomatic speakers invited to the event. Khan is explicit about what made that session different: it was not a photo-opportunity. Instead, participants engaged in a more candid, detailed and pointed discussion about how the relationship has been broken in recent years, and about how different governments, the African Union and the civil society representatives in the room could work together in a real way.
That candour is the currency such gatherings trade in. Off-stage sessions with senior diplomatic figures are where positions are tested and cooperation is negotiated, and the fact that this one followed a summit held on the continent itself gave the conversation a different texture than a Washington-based iteration might have.
For Khan, a throughline ran across all of these discussions, from the funders’ meeting to the hallway conversations to the closed-door breakfast. The attempt, she says, was to move discussions past the conference stage and into the real world, where participants can chip away at obstacles together and create a vision of the future they all want.
For those who follow the US-Africa policy space, the lesson is that the summit’s returns will show up not in communiqués but in the networks and commitments formed around it: funders coordinating their support, young professionals and entrepreneurs being pulled into the conversation, and diplomats and civil society agreeing to work together beyond the stage. Whether next year’s gathering keeps building that base, in Addis or elsewhere, is the open question the funders will now weigh.