The Kampala Geopolitics Conference, now in its ninth edition brings together policymakers, scholars, diplomats, students, and members of the public to do something deceptively simple: talk honestly about the world as it actually is, and what it means for Africa.
This year, the world has handed the conference a lot to work with. The six panels on the agenda cut across the most urgent fault lines in African geopolitics right now.
Money, sovereignty, power, youth, and the future of international cooperation, not as abstractions, but as live questions with real consequences for governments, communities, and the next generation of African leaders.
Bretton Woods Institutions: Reimagining the Global Financial Architecture for African Growth in a Fractured World
The conversation about global finance may be the most foundational. The Bretton Woods institutions — the IMF, the World Bank, the rules governing how money crosses borders were designed in 1944 by a room that did not include most of the world.
Eighty years later, African governments are still borrowing at rates that make serious development a fiscal gamble, while sitting on the minerals and resources the global economy most urgently needs.
This is not abstract. It shows up in every negotiation with an IMF mission team, in every bond prospectus drafted at punitive spreads, in every cabinet decision about whether to service external debt or fund a hospital.
This panel will ask what it actually takes to change that equation and what African states do while waiting for a system not built for them to be rebuilt.
Borrowed Peace, Mortgaged Resources: The DRC's Sovereignty Dilemma and the Prospects for Lasting Peace Between the Doha Framework and the Washington Accord
From there, the conference moves to the Democratic Republic of Congo — a case study in what happens when peace is negotiated under military pressure, with mineral access as part of the price of engagement.
The two-track process that emerged through Doha and Washington was forged in a moment of emergency, mediated by powers with their own preoccupations, and contested at home as constitutionally insufficient.
Whether that kind of arrangement can hold, and what it reveals about the choices available to African states when international institutions are absent or distracted, is a question that extends well beyond Kinshasa.
It is a question about what sovereignty actually means when the only partners willing to show up come with conditions attached.
Ethiopia's Regional Ambitions and the Balance of Power in the Horn of Africa: Sea Access, Ports and Corridors and State Sovereignty
In the Horn of Africa, Ethiopia's pursuit of sea access has unsettled its neighbours and tested the limits of regional diplomacy.
As Africa's second most populous country, Ethiopia's moves to secure port agreements and transport corridors have drawn sharp responses from Somalia, Eritrea, and Djibouti, exposing real fault lines in how the region manages competing interests
. This panel will examine whether the Horn is moving toward genuine cooperation or competitive fragmentation and whether existing regional mechanisms are adequate to carry the weight of those tensions, or whether they are simply not built for this moment.
Africa and External Powers: Shaping the Terms of Engagement
Running through all of it is a question about who sets the terms. China, the United States, Russia, and Gulf states have each expanded their footprint on the continent, every one of them using the language of partnership, each with a different logic underneath it
. With USAID dismantled and aid flows contracting sharply, this panel goes further and examines what a genuinely different model of international cooperation might look like, one that pools resources between public and private actors, centres local ownership, and builds relationships on mutual benefit rather than the donor-recipient dynamic that has shaped so much of the last half-century.
The question is not nostalgic, it is urgent because the programmes that have stopped and the health systems that now have holes in them belong to real people.
New Faces of Development Assistance: Towards Solidarity-Based, Sustainable Investments Based on a Logic of Partnerships
The dismantlement of USAID did not happen in isolation. It was the sharpest expression of a broader shift, the idea, gaining ground in several powerful countries, that international aid as currently structured is expensive and does not deliver commensurate returns.
Whatever one thinks of that argument, its consequences are real. This panel examines how to rebuild the frameworks of international assistance around shared benefit, national sovereignty, and genuine partnership moving away from charity dressed up as cooperation, and toward something with a longer shelf life.
How Can Youth Shape Public Policies in Africa?
And then there is the room itself. Over 60 percent of Africa's population is under 25. By 2050, one in three young people on earth will be African.
Yet formal institutions remain strikingly insulated from that reality young people are consulted just enough to say they were consulted, then largely left outside the rooms where decisions are made.
This panel will examine not whether young Africans have ideas and energy, because the evidence for both is everywhere, but why the structures of power have been so effective at keeping them at the edges of the decisions that will shape their lives.
The gap between a continent that is majority young and institutions dominated by older generations is not incidental. It is a governance problem, and it deserves to be named as one.
Why it matters that Kampala is having this conversation
The Kampala Geopolitics Conference will not resolve any of this, no two-day gathering does. But there is real value in a room where these questions can be asked plainly, where the gap between diplomatic language and lived reality can be named, and where Africa is not the subject of someone else's agenda but the author of its own conversation.
Nine editions in, that remains the point of the Kampala Geopolitics Conference.
The Kampala Geopolitics Conference takes place April 15–16, 2026, in Kampala, Uganda.