Finance and Investment
By the third day of the 3i Africa Summit 2026, the conversation had evolved in a way that felt almost inevitable. The summit had arrived at the question that had always been lurking, the one that nobody in a convening of this kind wants to ask: whose Africa is it anyway?
Technology
Forty-six percent, that is the share of African adults who remain entirely outside the formal financial system. Set it alongside the headline numbers the $2 trillion in mobile money transactions, the 66% share of global mobile money value and what you get is not a success story.
Finance and Investment
Africa’s ambition to build a fully integrated digital economy is gaining renewed momentum as governments, regulators and industry leaders intensify efforts to harmonise systems, reduce cross-border transaction costs and strengthen digital infrastructure to unlock continental trade.
health
Ghana became one of the more high-profile withdrawals when talks over a proposed $109 million, five-year US aid package collapsed after Washington allegedly demanded access to Ghanaian citizens' personal data.
Finance and Investment
Less than 30% of SMEs across the continent maintain digital financial records, not because the information does not exist, but because it remains scattered, unstructured, and largely invisible to machines.
Business
The overwhelming majority of capital raised by African startups over the past decade has been structured through holding companies domiciled outside of Africa. Typically, in Delaware, Mauritius, or the Cayman Islands. The innovation is African, but the architecture is not.
Technology
At the launch of Ghana's National Artificial Intelligence Strategy in Accra, President John Dramani Mahama announced the $250 million investment to establish a world-class AI computing center, alongside a $20 million commitment for a short-to-medium term implementation.
Technology
At recent gatherings where Africa's financial technology future has been debated, including the Africa Fintech Summit held in Washington D.C., one theme cut through the noise with unusual clarity: the continent is no longer building fintech as a sector. It is building fintech as infrastructure.
African Progress
What kind of Africa was being built before the ships came? And what does it actually mean for Africa to develop? They sit underneath the reparations debate. You cannot make the case for repair without understanding what was lost, and what building truly means.
Governance
Every year, the world pours more than $2 trillion into weapons, armies, and military equipment, while children go unschooled, hospitals lack equipment, and the world burns. If we keep choosing weapons over schools, then what we pass on is a world more unequal, and unstable than the one we received.
Governance
Over the course of four centuries, ~12.5 million Africans were forcibly transported through the transatlantic slave trade, making enslavement a brutal reality for millions. In a vote, 123 countries at the UN formally declared the transatlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity
culture
This is Bògòlanfini — Bogolan — the mudcloth of Mali. It is one of the most quietly powerful stories Africa has never fully told the world. In a continent where so much of the conversation about progress centers on what lies underground, minerals, oil, gold.