Macron pitches new Africa partnership in Nairobi

More than 30 heads of state and government gathered in Nairobi for the Africa Forward summit as Emmanuel Macron pitched a reset of France’s Africa policy, according to The Guardian. It is the first time the long-running summit — held every few years since the 1970s — has taken place in a non-francophone country. Macron used the meeting to announce new investments and to argue that future ties should be built around “sovereignty” and co-investment rather than assistance.

The venue choice is part of the message. France has been pushed out of several former strongholds in west and central Africa, and since 2022 it has withdrawn troops from Mali, Niger and Chad amid deteriorating relations and accusations of neocolonial influence, The Guardian reports. Holding the summit in Kenya, an anglophone diplomatic hub, signals an attempt to widen the relationship beyond the old francophone network that defined Françafrique — the mix of political access, commercial deals and military leverage that kept Paris close to post-colonial elites for decades.

The rhetoric at the summit leaned heavily on equality. Kenya’s president William Ruto invoked sovereignty repeatedly and said the days of European dependency were over, framing future partnerships as “win-win” investment rather than charity. Macron, for his part, said “the days of offering assistance are behind us,” and described a “shared agenda” in which “your success is our success.” The programme included networking sessions on youth, creative industries and sport, and discussions with African Union representatives, financiers and development actors on energy transition, peace and security, and reform of international financial institutions.

But the gap between language and leverage is where these summits tend to be tested. Investment pledges and co-financing can be a cleaner instrument than troop deployments, yet they still hinge on who sets terms, who absorbs risk, and who gets paid first when projects underperform. The Guardian notes that Paris is trying to repackage its approach as more economic and less tied to colonial history; the same move also reflects competition for influence as African governments diversify partners and as domestic politics in several Sahel states has made overt French security roles politically toxic.

If France’s pitch is that it no longer wants to be an indispensable patron, African leaders now have a simple way to measure it: the contracts, the conditionality, and the exit clauses.

In Nairobi, sovereignty was the most repeated word on stage, and the hardest one to price.