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27 January 2023

The U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit Marks a Seismic Shift in Relations with the Continent

ZAINAB USMAN, JULIETTE OVADIA, ALINE ABAYO

The second edition of the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit (ALS) took place in Washington last week. Much has changed since former president Barack Obama held the inaugural summit in 2014, halfway through his second term. At that time, the geopolitical environment for strengthening ties was less fraught: global economic integration was accelerating, and Africa was “rising” from sluggish growth and persistent poverty. The initial summit was framed as an important first step in engaging with a “a new, more prosperous Africa,” as Obama put it. But this year’s summit occurred against a worrying economic and political backdrop of global inflation, an impending debt crisis for several African countries, intensifying strategic competition between the United States and China, and a hot war in Ukraine. In an uncertain international landscape, great and middle powers see a vital national interest in revamping relations with a continent that is perhaps the last frontier of future economic growth and an outsize voting bloc in multilateral fora.

Zainab Usman is a senior fellow and director of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. Her fields of expertise include institutions, economic policy, energy policy, and emerging economies in Africa.

Many of the analyses of the just-concluded ALS hosted by U.S. President Joe Biden compare it with high-level Africa summits convened by other great and middle powers. After all, the Africa + U.S. summit is one of eleven different recurring “Africa +1” summits, and Africa+1 summitry has occurred with increasing frequency over the last decade. Such comparisons often focus on regularity (the 2022 iteration was only the second ALS, versus eight Forums on China-Africa Cooperation [FOCAC] and eight Tokyo International Conferences on African Development [TICAD] as of this year); the headline financial commitment ($55 billion pledged by the United States at the 2022 ALS compared to China’s $40 billion pledge at the 2021 FOCAC and Japan’s $30 billion at the 2022 TICAD); the number of heads of states in attendance (forty-six including the chairperson of the African Union Commission at the 2022 ALS compared to fifty-one at the 2018 FOCAC); and whether bilateral meetings were set up between individual visiting African leaders and the host president (none at the ALS, while bilateral meetings with the Chinese president are a staple of FOCAC).


A “like-for-like” comparison is a worthy endeavor, but it is a narrow framework for evaluating the summit’s role in shaping the U.S. approach to Africa. A more useful assessment should take into account the evolution of American relations with the continent over the past few decades as well as more recent engagements with other low- and middle-income regions of the world, such as the U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit in May 2022 with Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) countries and the Summit of the Americas in June 2022 with Latin American countries. Evaluating the ALS in this light, the Biden administration’s approach to the summit ushered in a potentially seismic shift in the U.S. relationship with African countries. Five key policy approaches enabled this success.Mobilizing a “Whole-of-Government” Approach

The Biden administration mobilized the full scope of the U.S. federal government to conduct the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit. The White House anchored the ALS: President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris gave several keynote speeches and hosted roundtables, bilateral meetings, lunches, and dinners with the forty-nine visiting African delegations. Still, the leadership of various U.S. government entities was also represented at the highest levels. There were cabinet secretaries from the Departments of State, Defense, Energy, Health, Agriculture, Labor, and Commerce; the heads of top federal agencies including the U.S. Export-Import Bank, the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, the U.S. African Development Foundation, the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Trade Representative, and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency; and members of the U.S. Congress including outgoing House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Neither the leaders from Latin America nor those from Southeast Asia—hosted at their respective leaders’ summits in the United States this year—received such a grand reception as did African leaders from December 13 to 15.

Juliette Ovadia is a program coordinator and research assistant for the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Furthermore, throughout the summit’s dialogue sessions, senior U.S. government officials displayed remarkable openness to listening to and collaborating with their African counterparts. This receptiveness helped temper the long-held frustrations of many African stakeholders at what they perceive as persistent badgering by U.S. government officials about African institutional inadequacies and the tendency to delegate lower-ranking American officials to engage with senior African policymakers.Supporting Africa’s Representation in Global Governance

One of the major highlights of the ALS was Biden’s formal announcement of U.S. support for the African Union’s bid to join the G20 as a permanent member and his reiteration of U.S. support for UN Security Council reform to add a permanent member from the African continent. While this announcement comes weeks after Beijing and Paris expressed their support for African Union (AU) membership in the G20, it nevertheless carries a heavy weight because other major European countries will likely follow Washington’s lead on reforming global governance institutions. The promise to expand decisionmaking in international institutions to include Africa was particularly notable because neither ASEAN nor the Organization of American States (OAS) received an analogous pledge from the United States during their respective leaders’ summits.Pledging Billions to Advance Shared Priorities

Perhaps the most talked about outcome of the ALS is the United States’ commitment of $55 billion to the African continent over the next three years. These funds will support the AU’s Agenda 2063 by investing in human capital, infrastructure, agriculture, health systems, and security in ways that advance shared U.S. and African priorities. It may be tempting to contrast this funding amount with the $40 billion announced at the 2021 FOCAC, but a better analogy is to previous U.S. initiatives toward Africa.

Aline Abayo is a James C. Gaither Junior Fellow in the Carnegie Africa Program.

This $55 billion includes over “$15 billion in [new] two-way trade and investment commitments, deals, and partnerships” announced during the summit to be anchored by more than a dozen U.S. federal departments and agencies (see Table below). Much of this headline pledge will comprise existing initiatives, and several will depend on the ability to secure actual funding from the U.S. Congress within the next twenty-four months. This financial pledge is different from the flagship initiatives announced previously: Obama’s Power Africa; George W. Bush’s President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR); and Donald Trump’s Prosper Africa. Similarly, the $55 billion dwarfs the new financial pledges announced at the U.S.-ASEAN Special Summit ($150 million) and the Summit for the Americas.

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