The Alamein Africa Forum opened Friday in New Alamein on Egypt’s northern coast, a three-day gathering of roughly 1,500 government officials, business leaders, investors and financial institution representatives from across Africa. Its purpose is practical: turn continental economic integration from an aspiration into working arrangements. Egypt is organizing the event in cooperation with the African Export-Import Bank and the African Union Development Agency, with discussions centered on economic development, investment and deeper integration. The institutional groundwork came earlier, at the African Union summit in Addis Ababa last February, where member states approved holding the forum every two years in New Alamein.
President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi used his opening address Saturday to frame the operating environment as the precondition for everything the forum hopes to deliver. “Economic development cannot be built in unstable countries, and stability is not a luxury but a fundamental pillar sought by investors, manufacturers and farmers so they can operate in a safe environment,” he said. He urged African countries to prioritize peaceful solutions to conflicts, strengthen state institutions and respect national sovereignty.
“Across our African continent, we fully understand that security begins with supporting the national state and its institutions, respecting its unity and sovereignty, prioritizing peaceful solutions to conflicts and crises, and upholding the principle of good neighborliness,” el-Sissi added.
By contrast with the rhetoric of integration, the figures he presented describe how the continent’s economies actually run. Africa’s private sector, he said, drives the continent’s economies, contributing more than 70% of gross domestic product. Yet about 85% of its transactions are conducted with companies from outside the continent. Despite trade agreements and preferential arrangements among African countries, intra-African trade has accounted for only about 18% of the continent’s total trade in recent years, according to el-Sissi.
Those numbers sit at the heart of the forum’s purpose. A gathering built around investment and integration is, in effect, an attempt to close that gap, connecting the officials, financiers and business leaders present in New Alamein with the agreements already on paper. The two-year cycle approved in Addis Ababa is meant to give the effort a recurring institutional home rather than a one-off meeting.
Meanwhile, el-Sissi addressed the external conditions under which African economies are being asked to deliver. Africa, he said, aspires to “a world characterized by peace and stability, rather than being made to bear the consequences of global crises in which it was not a party but whose negative repercussions it suffers.” He cited the current energy crisis, pointing to rising fuel and fertilizer prices and disruptions in supply and shipping chains as pressures landing directly on African countries.
For the operators, manufacturers and farmers el-Sissi described, those disruptions translate into practical bottlenecks: costlier inputs, less predictable logistics and a harder environment in which to run and expand operations. His argument was that resolving conflicts and strengthening institutions is not a separate diplomatic agenda but part of the same delivery problem, since investment and production require a safe and stable setting in order to function.
As the forum continues through its three-day program, the measure of its usefulness will be whether the contacts and commitments formed in New Alamein move the continent’s trade and investment figures beyond the levels el-Sissi described, and whether the biennial format can sustain that work between sessions.