AfCFTA, Flutterwave leaders converge on Cape Town for Africa's delivery imperative

In mid-September, Cape Town will host a gathering of Africa's most consequential leaders—the ones tasked with turning the continent's grandest ambitions into tangible results. The African Continental Free Trade Area's Secretary-General, Wamkele Mene, will share the stage with Olugbenga Agboola of Flutterwave, Mteto Nyathi who chairs Eskom, and a roster of government officials, infrastructure specialists, and technology entrepreneurs. They're converging for the PMI Global Summit Series on September 14 and 15 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, and the gathering carries an unmistakable weight: Africa Delivers M.O.R.E. Together.

The summit's organizing principle cuts to something fundamental. Africa has no shortage of vision. Agenda 2063, the continental development blueprint, exists. National governments have articulated their own ambitions. What's missing, organizers argue, is the machinery to deliver—the institutions, the skilled people, the project management capability that transforms a plan on paper into something people can actually use. George Asamani, managing director of PMI Sub-Saharan Africa, frames it plainly: the distance between what leaders say they want and what citizens experience is where the real work happens. This summit aims to close that gap.

Mene's keynote will anchor the conversation in trade and integration. His role as architect of the world's largest free trade area gives him standing to speak about what continental ambition requires: connected markets, the ability to move goods and people across borders without friction, economies powered reliably, and business conducted with ease across national lines. Behind each of these sits a delivery challenge—the unglamorous work of building systems, training people, and managing complex projects at scale.

The program itself moves from policy abstraction into concrete problem-solving. Nyathi will lead discussions on delivering reliable energy access, the foundation for any economic growth. Agboola will address the financial and digital infrastructure the AfCFTA needs to function—payment systems, digital rails, the plumbing that allows trade to actually happen. Willem Botha from Zutari will examine the infrastructure projects required to build a continent less fragmented by borders. And Ziaad Suleman, leading Cassava Technologies across South Africa and Botswana, will tackle something newer and more urgent: how Africa moves from consuming artificial intelligence to building it, from importing solutions to creating them.

The summit also includes a high-level panel on African integration itself, bringing together officials from the African Union Commission, South Africa's Presidency, and Ghana's government, moderated by the African Development Bank. Parallel sessions will focus on how governments in Kenya, Uganda, Cape Town, and South Africa are building the project management offices—the PMOs—that turn policy into execution. These are the institutional bones that most development conversations skip over but that actually determine whether anything gets built.

This gathering builds momentum from last year's summit in Kigali, which drew more than a thousand project professionals and government officials. The conversation has shifted from whether Africa can integrate to how it actually gets done—the methods, the pitfalls, the practices that work. Asamani's closing thought captures the stakes: project management is ultimately about closing the distance between ambition and experience. Delivery is what turns plans into progress. In Cape Town next month, Africa's leaders will be asked to show their work.