President William Ruto closed the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi on Tuesday with a call for African governments and development partners to translate the commitments made over two days into tangible progress, telling delegates at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre that Africa is approaching the future with ambition, not hesitation. Ruto co-chaired the summit alongside French President Emmanuel Macron, with 40 heads of state from Africa and France pledging to the new Africa-France Impact Coalition.
The headline number is €23 billion (roughly US$27 billion) in committed investments — €14 billion from French private and public funds and €9 billion from African investors — directed at energy transition, agriculture, and artificial intelligence. Macron told reporters the summit marked a financial shift in the relationship and framed it as a partnership of equals. Crucially, he indicated support for a first-loss guarantee mechanism designed to de-risk investment on the continent and pledged to lobby for the idea at the upcoming G7 summit, where Ruto has now been invited to attend.
The diplomatic timing is not accidental. France has been losing ground across its former zones of influence in the Sahel, and African leaders watching the broader contraction of Western multilateral engagement — frozen US health programmes earlier this year, volatility in development financing, contested aid corridors — are positioning themselves to negotiate the next decade of partnerships from a stronger collective platform. The €23 billion will be measured against delivery rather than rhetoric, and the Africa-France Impact Coalition has explicitly committed to sustainable implementation tracking.
Sources: Capital FM Nairobi; allAfrica; France 24; Al Jazeera, May 12–13, 2026.