2025 Africa Prosperity Dialogues open today

The Africa Prosperity Dialogues (APD) 2025 will open today and end on Saturday, February 1, at the Accra International Conference Centre (AICC), with over 3,000 participants from 46 countries discussing and generating valuable insights and momentum to accelerate progress towards a shared vision for a prosperous and integrated African continent.

At the centre of this year’s discussions and thematic meetings will be how to deliver infrastructure for the continent, a necessity for pushing integrated and inter-continental trading activities under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) initiative. 

Vice-President opens

Organised by the Africa Prosperity Network (APN) in collaboration with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat, APD 2025 is on the theme: “Delivering Africa’s Single Market through Infrastructure: Invest. Connect. Integrate.”

The three-day event is expected to commence with breakfast meetings to be convened by some top chief executives.

There will also be a formal opening ceremony which is expected to be graced by the Vice-President, Professor Naana Jane Opoku-Agyemang, and the Secretary-General of AfCFTA, Wamkele Mene.

There will be a Presidential and Business Executives Dialogue as well as a Presidential ball, an Africa Prosperity Champions Awards climaxed with a Presidential Gala Dinner on Saturday.

Sahel States

The Head of Communications at the Africa Prosperity Network, Prince Moses, explained that the dialogues would have participants from the breakaway Alliance for Sahel States, made up of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger.

He was addressing the question of the availability of persons from Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali at the APD 2025.

Mr Moses said with presentations by the AfCFTA Director for Trading Services, Investment, Intellectual Property Rights (IPR), and Digital Trade, the APD was going to have the context set by the Vice-President of the African Development Bank (AfDB), while a second panel would look at the transport and logistics necessary for free movement within the region and how to make it a reality.

That, the head of communications said, would be addressing gaps in transport and logistics, saying that the cost of intra-African trade went up by 40 per cent because of serious inefficiencies in the infrastructure systems across the region.

He also mentioned problems with visas and connections to and from other African countries and gave the assurance that they were issues the dialogues would seek to address.

Mr Moses said the series would be looking at infrastructure in different areas, and because it was a multi-dimensional cross-sectoral set of conversations between the public and private sectors at the highest level, speakers and panellists would address the information asymmetries in order to bridge the gap between the public and private sectors.