El-Alamein, on Egypt’s Mediterranean coast, hosted more than 20 heads of state and government this weekend with a message about who should fund Africa’s future: Africa itself, for the hundreds of millions of people who depend on its economies for jobs, trade and services.
The three-day Alamein Africa Forum argued that the continent can “do much better” in financing its own growth and reducing reliance on external money. Business leaders, bankers and development institutions joined the inaugural gathering.
The numbers presented to delegates show how much room remains. Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, chairperson of the African Union Commission, told the forum that intra-African trade reached $220 billion in 2024, or 14.4 percent of the continent’s total trade. That trade grew 12.4 percent in 2024 after a 5.9 percent contraction the year before. He called the trend encouraging, but added that “Africa can do much better.”
Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi, speaking at the opening, focused on the private sector as the engine of ordinary Africans’ economic life. It accounts for more than 70 percent of gross domestic product, he said. Yet African businesses remain more connected to markets outside the continent than to their own neighbors.
“Around 85 percent of African private-sector transactions are conducted with companies outside the continent,” El-Sisi said. The forum, he explained, is meant to help African firms find opportunities closer to home and build cross-border partnerships, connections that could broaden access to goods, investment and work across the continent.
What changes for citizens: the forum is set to become a biennial event under an African Union mandate, focused on infrastructure, trade, agriculture, health care, mining, technology and renewable energy. Those are the sectors that touch daily life directly, from the roads and power grids people rely on, to the food they buy, the clinics they visit and the energy that lights their homes.
For Egypt, the summit also marks a strategic turn. After long concentrating on the Middle East and the Mediterranean, Cairo is increasingly looking south, seeking to reclaim influence in a continent where China and Gulf powers, especially the United Arab Emirates, have expanded their footprint. Officials estimate Egyptian investments in Africa at around $14 billion, including Tanzania’s $3 billion Julius Nyerere Hydropower Project.
Meanwhile, the forum arrives at a diplomatically sensitive moment. Egypt is seeking broader African backing in its long-running dispute with Ethiopia over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, which Cairo views as a threat to its share of Nile waters, a concern with direct implications for the water supply of Egypt’s population. Ethiopia, which inaugurated the dam last year, calls it essential for economic development. Egypt argues its operation should be governed by a binding agreement.
Whether the El-Alamein forum can turn its ambitions into closer continental integration remains to be seen. The leaders who convened there framed the stakes plainly: a continent that trades and invests more within its own borders would be better placed to finance the growth its people need.