NAIROBI, KENYA – The 2024 Africa Forward Summit concluded on Tuesday with a core theme of reciprocal respect between France and African nations, marking a potential turning point in post-colonial relations between the European power and the African continent. During the closing proceedings, French President Emmanuel Macron announced a landmark 23-billion-euro ($27-billion) investment package designed to support key development sectors across Africa, from clean energy expansion and artificial intelligence innovation to agricultural modernization.
Macron detailed the structure of the investment plan: 14 billion euros ($16.4 billion) will be contributed by private and public French companies, while the remaining 9 billion euros ($10.5 billion) will come from African institutional partners. He framed the mixed funding model as a clear break from past power dynamics, positioning the initiative as a financial shift that redefines ties between France and African countries, including its 14 former colonial territories across West and Central Africa.
Kenya, the co-host of the summit alongside France, used its platform to underscore Africa’s demands for equal standing. Kenyan President William Ruto referenced national and continental sovereignty eight times in his closing address, emphasizing that the era of African reliance on European patronage has come to an end.
“New partnerships between African nations and France must not be built on dependency but on sovereign equality, not on aid or charity but on mutually beneficial investment, and not on extraction or exploitation but on win-win engagements,” Ruto told assembled delegates. The summit is expected to wrap up with a formal joint declaration signed by 30 attending heads of state and government by the end of Tuesday.
The gathering comes amid widespread tensions between France and several West African nations that were once its colonies. For decades, France maintained a sphere of political, economic and military influence across much of West Africa, a system widely known as Françafrique that included a permanent deployment of thousands of French troops across the region. In recent years, rising anti-French sentiment and criticism from newly installed leaders in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso, who decried France’s approach as demeaning and overbearing, pushed Paris to withdraw nearly all of its military presence from the region. France completed its final troop pullout from Senegal in July this year.
Macron used his summit address to confirm Paris’s new approach, committing to unconditional respect for every African nation’s independent policy choices. “Sovereignty and autonomy is shared, and your success is our success,” Macron said. He added that France’s long-standing model of one-sided aid to African countries is a thing of the past, and that Paris will now center its engagement on collaborative investment.
“I’d like to focus on co-investment,” Macron stated, praising the high turnout of African leaders as evidence of a unified African continent with aligned priorities for forward-looking partnerships.