FULL SPEECH: Kenya’s President Ruto Calls for Africa Financial Independence at Global Summit | AC14

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Thank you so much for the president.

[00:00:01]Thank you.

[00:00:05]Your Excellency Emmanuel Macron, president of the French Republic and co-chair of the Africa Forward Summit 2026.

[00:00:15]Excellencies, heads of state and government, honorable ministers, captains of industry, distinguished delegates, ladies and gentlemen, it is a profound honor and privilege to welcome you to the Africa Forward Summit 2026 here in Nairobi, Kenya, the cradle of humankind, the birthplace of our shared human history, and the origin of wonder.

[00:00:46]Wherever you come from, you are not merely visiting.

[00:00:51]You are returning to the very beginnings of humanity.

[00:00:57]And so, with warmth, friendship, and pride, I say to you all, welcome home.

[00:01:06]Bienvenue, shivu, karibuni nyumbani.

[00:01:13]We gather, ladies and gentlemen, at a profound, consequential moment in global affairs.

[00:01:20]The foundations of international order are being reshaped by deepening geopolitical divisions, persistent conflicts, economic volatility, climate pressures, and widening inequalities.

[00:01:38]Long-standing assumptions about global stability, cooperation, and prosperity are being tested as never before.

[00:01:50]At the same time, shifting centers of influence, changing trade alignments, and the reconfiguration of global supply chains are redefining the architecture of the world economy itself.

[00:02:06]Yet, in moments such as this, fragmentation cannot be the answer.

[00:02:15]Nor isolation the strategy.

[00:02:19]The times before us demand stronger cooperation, renewed multilateralism, and partnerships grounded not on hierarchy, but in sovereign equality, mutual respect, and shared responsibility.

[00:02:42]It is not how we do it.

[00:02:47]It is in that spirit that we convene this summit, grounded in our shared conviction that enduring partnerships must not be built on dependency, but on sovereign equality.

[00:03:04]Not on aid or charity, but on mutually beneficial investments.

[00:03:12]And not on extraction or exploitation, but on win-win engagements.

[00:03:20]Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Africa and France have a unique opportunity to forge a forward-looking partnership that delivers shared progress while advancing Africa's long-term economic transformation.

[00:03:38]Africa approaches this summit not from the margins of global affairs, but as a strategic actor in its own right, endowed with vast natural resources, expanding markets, and one of the greatest reservoirs of youthful talent and innovation anywhere in the world today.

[00:04:07]We all know by the year 2050 one in every four people on earth will be African.

[00:04:18]That reality alone will shape the future of labor.

[00:04:23]Will shape the future of markets, urbanization, energy demand, and global economic growth.

[00:04:32]Over the course of this summit our deliberations will focus on priorities fundamental to Africa's development trajectory and long-term prosperity.

[00:04:45]Among them, domestic mobilization of resources for Africa's development at scale.

[00:04:52]Reforms of the international financial architecture development of transport, logistics, and connectivity infrastructure energy transition and green industrialization. And of course youth skills development to foster creativity, innovation entrepreneurship and AI-driven transformation.

[00:05:19]First we must confront with honesty and agency the question of how Africa finances its own transformation.

[00:05:31]The era in which Africa's development was principally framed through aid, dependency, and unsustainable borrowing must give way to a new paradigm grounded in investment, innovation, domestic resource mobilization, and strategic partnerships built on sovereign equality and mutual benefit.

[00:05:59]Because Africa is not part of the global problem, Africa is in fact the solution to the global challenges that exist today, including those of Africa.

[00:06:15]Our continent possesses vast natural resources, critical minerals, fertile land, immense renewable energy potential, expanding consumer markets, dynamic entrepreneurs, and the youngest population in the world.

[00:06:35]What Africa requires today, friends, is not charity, but investments. Not extraction, but value creation. Not dependency, but mutually beneficial partnerships capable of unlocking shared prosperity.

[00:06:54]That is the essence of the Africa Forward Summit.

[00:07:01]It is about recalibrating Africa's place in the global order.

[00:07:07]It is about redefining engagements with Africa, including with long-standing partners such as France such as France, away from outdated models of aid and asymmetrical dependency towards a framework anchored on investment, enterprise, innovation, industrialization, and mutually beneficial cooperation.

[00:07:35]And we are very clear about this.

[00:07:37]The current international financial system remains structurally unequal.

[00:07:45]African countries continue to face disproportionately high borrowing costs, constrained access to concessional financing, and distorted risk perceptions that are frequently disconnected from economic realities that exist in this continent.

[00:08:04]The bias embedded within global credit rating systems continue to penalize African economies, increase the cost of capital, and discourage long-term investment into productive sectors.

[00:08:19]This imbalance is neither sustainable nor just.

[00:08:24]It is one of the principal constraints on Africa's ability to finance infrastructure, industrialization, climate adaptation, and economic transformation at the scale that is required.

[00:08:38]That is why Africa has supported the establishment of the African Credit Rating Agency, an important step towards ensuring fairer, evidence-based, and context-sensitive assessment of African economies and investment opportunities.

[00:09:02]Its purpose is not to replace existing global institutions, but to correct long-standing distortions in risk perception that continue to increase the cost of capital for African countries, and continue to discourage long-term investment into productive sectors.

[00:09:21]At the same time, we must recognize that the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund alone cannot finance Africa's development ambition.

[00:09:33]We have to be realistic.

[00:09:35]Even as reform efforts continue, the scale of Africa's transformation requires us to rethink the sources, structures, and instruments of development finance itself.

[00:09:52]Africa must increasingly finance Africa.

[00:09:57]Let me repeat that.

[00:09:59]Africa must increasingly finance Africa.

[00:10:08]What do I mean?

[00:10:10]Across our continent, enormous pools of domestic capital remain underutilized.

[00:10:18]Africa today holds more than $4 trillion in long-term domestic savings, including over $1 trillion in pensions and insurance assets, and more than $500 billion in central bank reserves.

[00:10:40]I am not talking about Europe. I'm talking about Africa.

[00:10:44]Yet, paradoxically, while this capital exists within African economies, governments across our continent continue to struggle to finance critical infrastructure, transport corridors, energy systems, industrial parks, logistics networks, and even affordable housing.

[00:11:08]There is capital in Africa, but Africa's development projects remain starved of financing.

[00:11:18]The issue, therefore, is not liquidity.

[00:11:23]It is risk architecture.

[00:11:26]That is why Africa is laying the foundation of a stronger, more resilient, and more self-sustaining financial architecture.

[00:11:39]Kenya therefore reaffirms its very strong support for the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions as a strategic platform for coordinating capital mobilization, risk sharing, and project execution across our continent.

[00:12:02]You remember, colleagues, that we did endorse at the last AU Summit the Alliance of African Multilateral Institutions.

[00:12:13]Starting with the World Bank and all the other institutions.

[00:12:16]Through institutions such as the African Development Bank, African Export-Import Bank or Afreximbank, African Finance Corporation, the Trade and Development Bank, Shelter Afrique Development Bank, Africa 50, and Africa Trade and Investment Development Insurance.

[00:12:37]Africa is steadily strengthening its capacity to finance infrastructure, industrialization, trade, housing, climate resilience, and economic transformation.

[00:12:54]These institutions are more than financial intermediaries.

[00:12:59]They are the instruments of African agency, strategic sovereignty, and collective self-determination.

[00:13:08]Friends, we must believe in ourselves.

[00:13:14]That is why we strongly support the recapitalization of African Trade and Investment Development Insurance as a critical pillar of the new African financial architecture for development. And I must thank the president of the African Development Bank, who is right here with us, for spearheading this effort together with all the other multilateral institutions.

[00:13:43]This is because Africa does not need more fragmented institutions.

[00:13:49]Africa needs coordinated financial firepower capable of financing infrastructure, industrialization, trade corridors, and energy transformation in our continent on our terms.

[00:14:05]It is in this spirit that the proposed new Africa financial architecture and development framework, NAFA, as we are calling it, seeks to align African multilateral institutions, sovereign investment platforms, pension systems, development banks, and private capital behind a coordinated continental investment strategy.

[00:14:36]Its objective is simply and simple, but transformative, to retain more African savings within Africa and channel them into productive, bankable, and transformative sectors of our economy.

[00:14:55]NAFA is designed to unlock long-term domestic institutional capital by creating credible project pipelines, harmonizing investment frameworks, strengthening regional capital markets, and establishing mechanisms that de-risk strategic public investments.

[00:15:14]By lowering risk and risk perception and improving project preparation, African pensions and insurance funds will be better positioned to invest confidently in infrastructure, industrialization, energy, housing, and regional connectivity projects across our continent.

[00:15:38]And by the way, I am still talking about resources that are African.

[00:15:44]Our own resources.

[00:15:46]Ultimately NAFAD represents Africa's collective effort to build financial sovereignty by aligning African institutions African savings, and African capital markets behind Africa's development priorities.

[00:16:06]And Kenya has already begun implementing the elements of this vision.

[00:16:10]Through the establishment of the National Infrastructure Fund, a platform designed to mobilize long-term domestic capital into strategic national projects.

[00:16:20]Already our new National Infrastructure Fund has mobilized approximately $1 billion in the last 4 months.

[00:16:29]Demonstrating the enormous potential that exists within African economies themselves.

[00:16:36]And this is money we have just mobilized here in Kenya.

[00:16:40]As government, we are deliberately partnering with the private sector to build confidence, reduce risk and crowd in investment into transformative public infrastructure.

[00:16:53]Our objective is simple.

[00:16:55]To create credible mechanisms through which private capital can participate securely and profitably in Africa's growth story.

[00:17:08]Kenya's experience demonstrates what domestic resource mobilization can achieve.

[00:17:15]Over the last 3 and a half years, we have mobilized nearly $4 billion locally for our affordable housing program.

[00:17:27]Through innovative domestic financing mechanisms, we are investing in housing, creating jobs, supporting enterprise, and expanding home ownership while restoring dignity to millions of Kenyan citizens.

[00:17:44]This experience demonstrates a fundamental truth.

[00:17:50]Africa can generate substantial development resources internally when institutions are strong, policies are credible and predictable, markets are trusted, and citizens themselves become active participants in nation-building.

[00:18:10]Excellencies, infrastructure development remains one of the most decisive foundations of Africa's economic transformation and continental integration.

[00:18:22]Africa's infrastructure financing gap continues to constrain productivity, continues to increase the cost of trade, weaken industrial competitiveness, and fragment markets across our continent.

[00:18:39]According to the African Development Bank, Africa requires between 130 and 170 billion dollars annually for infrastructure investment, with financing gaps estimated at between 70 and 100 billion dollars every year.

[00:18:58]Bridging this gap will not happen through public borrowing alone.

[00:19:03]It requires innovative financial instruments, blended finance mechanisms, de-risking facilities like the one I have talked about and strong public-private partnership capable of unlocking institutional capital at scale.

[00:19:21]But the broader challenge before us is continental.

[00:19:25]We must accelerate investment in transport corridors, in ports, rail systems, roads, aviation connectivity, and integrated logistics ecosystems capable of binding Africa together into one competitive economic space under the Africa Continental Free Trade Area.

[00:19:48]Because Africa cannot trade effectively with itself while its economies remain disconnected from one another.

[00:19:59]Connectivity is not merely about infrastructure. It is about competitiveness. It is about regional value chains. It is about food security.

[00:20:11]And it's about industrialization.

[00:20:14]And ultimately, it is about shared prosperity.

[00:20:19]Equally critical is the question of energy.

[00:20:23]That is why we must fundamentally restructure and strengthen Africa's financial architect architecture to mobilize the scale of capital required to finance this transformation on African terms.

[00:20:40]Excellencies, Africa possesses some of the greatest renewable energy potential anywhere in the world from geothermal resources in the Rift Valley and on to immense opportunities in solar, wind, hydroelectric power, and green hydrogen across our continent.

[00:20:59]Africa, therefore, has a historic opportunity not merely to participate in the global energy transition but to help lead it.

[00:21:11]But for Africa, the energy transition must also be a development and an industrialization transition.

[00:21:20]We must accept a future and we cannot Let me repeat that. We cannot accept a future in which Africa simply exports raw green minerals while industrial value addition advanced manufacturing and technological innovation take place elsewhere.

[00:21:41]That model belongs to the past.

[00:21:47]Africa must become a competitively industrial hub powered by clean energy modern infrastructure, innovation, and strategic investment partnerships.

[00:22:01]Green industrialization presents our continent with an opportunity not only to contribute meaningfully to global climate solutions but also to create jobs expand manufacturing capacity, strengthen exports deepen regional value chains, and accelerate structural economic transformation.

[00:22:21]Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen perhaps Africa's greatest strategic asset is its people.

[00:22:30]This demographic and the demographic reality that it presents will profoundly shape the future of labor markets the future of technology urbanization, consumption, innovation and of course, economic growth.

[00:22:49]Our youth population is not a burden to be managed.

[00:22:53]It is an extraordinary strategic advantage to be invested in.

[00:23:00]But demographic potential does not automatically become demographic power.

[00:23:06]It must be deliberately cultivated by education, skills development, research, digital inclusion, entrepreneurship, and technological innovation.

[00:23:20]We must equip Africa's young people not merely to seek jobs, but to create enterprise, build technologies, drive industrial transformation, and lead the next frontier of artificial intelligence and digital innovation.

[00:23:39]And across our continent, this transformation is already underway.

[00:23:44]From Nairobi to Lagos, from Kigali to Cape Town, young Africans are redefining finance through fintech, transforming agriculture through technology, expanding digital commerce, building global globally competitive startups, and creating solutions capable of shaping industries far beyond our borders.

[00:24:08]What they require is access.

[00:24:11]Access to quality education, access to digital infrastructure, access to affordable capital, access to markets, and of course, they will create the opportunities necessary.

[00:24:25]Ladies and gentlemen, none of these ambitions can be fully realized without peace, stability, and effective multilateral cooperation.

[00:24:37]Peace, security, and development remain inseparable foundations of sustainable progress.

[00:24:43]Yet across part of Africa and beyond, protracted conflicts, violent extremism, unconstitutional changes of government, terrorism, organized crime, and climate-related insecurity continue to undermine stability, weaken institutions, and constrain economic advancement.

[00:25:04]Current estimates indicate that Africa accounts for nearly 40% of active armed conflict globally and close to half of all internal displacements worldwide.

[00:25:19]These figures underscore both the scale but also the urgency of the challenges confronting our continent.

[00:25:28]We must therefore reaffirm our collective support for African-led peace and security mechanisms, including the Africa Union Peace and Security Architecture, predictable financing, institutional capacity, and international cooperation in support of lasting peace.

[00:25:51]But lasting peace cannot be secured through military response alone.

[00:25:55]Peace requires confronting the structural drivers of instability.

[00:26:00]Poverty, exclusion, unemployment, inequality, weak institutions, climate vulnerability, and the absence of economic opportunity, particularly for young people.

[00:26:14]That is why strengthening Africa's strategic autonomy in matters of peace and security remains an imperative.

[00:26:25]And it is why we reiterate with clarity and conviction the urgent necessity of reforming global peace and security governance, particularly the United Nations Security Council.

[00:26:40]It is both indispensable and unconscionable that a continent of nearly 1.5 billion people, represented by 54 sovereign states and constituting one of the largest blocks within the United Nations continues to remain excluded from permanent representation on the Security Council.

[00:27:06]Such inequality ladies and gentlemen, such inequality erodes legitimacy, undermines credibility, and diminishes confidence in multilateral systems itself.

[00:27:21]No global governance architecture can credibly claim to be democratic, to be representative, to be just, or fit for purpose while a substantial part of humanity remains absent from the table where the world's most consequential decisions are made.

[00:27:43]The time has come therefore for the international community to recognize without ambiguity or without delay that Africa cannot and will not and must not remain subject to decisions taken without its equal voice on the table.

[00:28:09]The reform of the Security Council is not merely an institutional adjustment.

[00:28:17]It is a moral obligation.

[00:28:20]It is a strategic necessity.

[00:28:22]It is indispensable to restoring trust, legitimacy, and confidence in the international order itself.

[00:28:31]Kenya therefore remains steadfast in its support for the common African position as articulated in the Ezulwini Consensus and the Sirte Declaration, which calls for Africa to be accorded permanent representation on the Security Council with all the prerogatives and privileges of permanent membership alongside additional non-permanent seats.

[00:28:56]Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Africa does not need privilege but fairness.

[00:29:03]We don't need exclusion but inclusion.

[00:29:06]We do not seek confrontation but partnership anchored on mutual respect, shared responsibility, and of course shared progress.

[00:29:15]This summit therefore presents us with an opportunity to define a new era of engagement between Africa and its partners, an era based not on dependency but on dignity.

[00:29:32]Not on extraction but on value creation.

[00:29:35]And not on short-term transactions but on long-term shared prosperity.

[00:29:42]Because the Africa we envision is an Africa of confidence, an Africa of ideas, an Africa of innovation, an Africa of enterprise, an Africa that believes in itself, invests in its people, mobilizes its mobilizes its own resources, and engages the world as an equal partner in shaping balanced, prosperous, and peaceful global future.

[00:30:15]Africa is rising determined to shape its own destiny and increasingly prepared to shape the future of the world itself.

[00:30:25]That is the Africa forward agenda.

[00:30:30]An agenda grounded not on dependency but in sovereignty.

[00:30:35]Not in vulnerability but in resilience.

[00:30:39]And not in limitation but in possibility.

[00:30:43]That is the Africa whose time has come.

[00:30:49]Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Kenya deeply is deeply honored to co-host this summit here in Nairobi.

[00:30:58]We look forward to productive deliberations, practical outcomes, and enduring partnerships capable of advancing prosperity, stability, dignity, and shared progress for our people and future generations.

[00:31:16]I thank you for your kind attention.

[00:31:18]Thank you very much.

[00:31:27]Thank you, Your Excellency, for the warm welcome and for reinforcing Africa's economic position today and the importance of partnership such as the African