#GabonInAction

🌍 Stop exporting raw materials. Start transforming on the continent. From the main stage of the Africa CEO Forum Annual Summit in Kigali, Gagan Gupta, Founder of @AriseIIP Group, @EquitaneGroup, A2MP and @spironigeria, laid out the operating doctrine behind one of Africa's most ambitious industrialisation portfolios. 🏭 The starting point was Gabon. The country was exporting round logs. ARISE set up a special economic zone designed to transform the wood domestically, structured as a 60/40 public-private partnership with the Gabonese state taking the larger stake. The model worked, and it has since been replicated by governments across the continent. Gupta's read of why it spread is striking. The battle in Africa, he argued, is mostly in the mind. Show that transformation is possible in one country, and the rest follow. ⛏️ The same logic now drives metal processing. 85% of Guinea's bauxite still ships out raw. 60 to 70% of African manganese leaves the continent untransformed. A2MP, in partnership with the Gabonese government, will bring the country's first smelter online this September. It is a structural shift that should have happened decades ago. 🛵 Spiro takes the same playbook into mobility and energy transition. Gupta sees the next five years as the biggest energy transition Africa will undergo. The Chinese reference point is instructive. Electric motorcycle penetration in China went from near zero in the early 2010s to virtually universal today, with combustion vehicles now a luxury in Shanghai. Africa is heading the same way, faster than most expect, because no government can sustainably subsidise fuel or foreign exchange indefinitely. Spiro is creating the demand that pulls cell and battery manufacturing onto the continent, rather than waiting for it. 🤝 The thread across all three businesses is the same. Deep public-private partnerships with governments holding 30 to 40% stakes, not symbolic 5 to 10% positions. Skin in the game on both sides. That, in Gupta's experience, is what makes industrial transformation actually move from PowerPoint to production line. #ACF2026 @

🌍 Three Heads of State, one unmistakable message echoing through Kigali at #ACF2026. 👤 Presidents Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema and Paul Kagame have set the tone of the Annual Summit around a shared conviction: Africa's future will be built, financed and owned by Africans themselves. 💡 From Nigeria comes the call to end the extractive paradigm and back ambition with capital and value addition; from Gabon, the case for reading the continent as a single business proposition where alliances become strategic assets; and from Rwanda, the lucid reminder that Africa already holds what it needs and the time has come to put it to full use. 🚀 Three voices, one direction: pan-African capitalism, sovereignty and value creation are no longer aspirations but the operating logic of the African decade ahead. 📍 Follow every #ACF2026 session live from Kigali! #ACF2026 #AfricaCEOForum

📆 While the world's cameras are turned to the inaugural #AfricaForward Summit in Nairobi on 11-12 May, the continent's economic boardroom convenes just 48 hours later. From 14-15 May, six sitting Heads of State gather in Kigali for the Africa CEO Forum 2026, the largest pan-African meeting of presidents, CEOs and investors, where the continent's political leadership and its private sector write the next chapter of African prosperity together. 👤 H.E. @PaulKagame, President of Rwanda and host of the summit, welcomes H.E. Bola Ahmed Tinubu @officialABAT (Nigeria), H.E. Brice Clotaire Oligui Nguema (Gabon), H.E. Daniel Chapo (Mozambique), H.E. Mohamed Cheikh Ould El Ghazouani (Mauritania) and H.E. Mamadi Doumbouya (Guinea). 🌍 Six leaders who represent some of the most strategic economies on the continent, all aligned on a single conviction: the future of Africa will be financed, built and owned by Africans, with the private sector as the central engine. 💡 This is what sets ACF apart. Where most international forums frame the continent through the prism of bilateral relations, the Africa CEO Forum convenes 2,000 African and global decision-makers around the issues that will define the next decade: megaprojects and infrastructure, pan-African capitalism, productivity, industrial sovereignty and the acceleration of the AfCFTA. The conversations in Kigali set Africa's own agenda, on Africa's own terms. 📍 Kigali, 14-15 May 2026. The continent's economic centre of gravity. 🎟️ Programme and registration: theafricaceoforum.com/forum-… #ACF2026 #AfricaCEOForum