When French President Emmanuel Macron and Kenyan President William Ruto open the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi on Monday, May 11, the setting will tell its own story: for the first time in the event’s history, a France–Africa summit is being held not in France and not in a Francophone African country, but in a former British colony. The choice of Kenya is a frank admission by Paris that its decades‑long grip on West Africa and the Sahel has collapsed, and that France is now scrambling to find new friends on a continent that, in growing numbers, is showing it the door.
Why Nairobi, and why now
The Africa Forward Summit, officially branded “Africa-France Partnerships for Innovation and Growth“, will bring together Macron, Ruto and approximately 30 African heads of state and government for two days of talks on May 11 and 12.
France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes the agenda as building “equal, forward‑looking partnerships that put jobs, sovereignty and climate resilience at the heart of our shared future.” Topics include climate finance, digital infrastructure, green energy and reform of international financial institutions, sectors where France hopes new investment pledges and partnerships can rebuild credibility that has eroded sharply in its traditional spheres of influence.
The decision to hold the summit in Nairobi was announced at the 79th UN General Assembly in New York in September 2024, when Ruto and Macron agreed it would be the first France–Africa summit ever staged in an English‑speaking African country and the first held outside France altogether. According to Nation Africa, France approached Kenya after the deteriorating security situation and political hostility in West Africa made organizing a credible summit there implausible.
As one East African analyst put it bluntly, “Kenya is France’s Plan B, and everyone, Paris included, knows it.”
The wreckage left behind in the Sahel
To understand why France is in Nairobi, you need to understand what happened between Paris and its former colonies in the Sahel over the past five years.
In rapid succession:
- Mali expelled French forces and diplomats after its military leaders accused France of condescension and complicity with jihadist groups — a charge Paris denied — and invited in Russian Wagner Group contractors instead.
- Burkina Faso ordered French troops out in early 2023, the interim government calling their presence “neocolonial” and turning instead toward Russia and, more recently, Russian‑linked security networks.
- Niger, the last pillar of France’s Sahel strategy, followed suit after a military coup in July 2023 that toppled the elected government France had backed.
The departures ended Operation Barkhane, France’s flagship anti-jihadist deployment that at its peak had 5,500 troops spread across five Sahel nations. Responsible Statecraft’s analysis describes what followed as France’s “humiliating exit from West Africa and the Sahel,” a phrase now used by multiple analysts and French media.
The political context was equally damaging. Anti‑French sentiment spread from streets in Bamako to Ouagadougou and Niamey, fueled by a generation of Africans who saw France less as a security guarantor than as a patron of corrupt civilian governments and a protector of its own strategic interests: uranium, oil, and transit routes.
As IOL’s analysis notes, “France is participating in this year’s Africa–France Summit not as a powerful partner any longer, but as a country that is fast losing its foothold in Africa.”
Kenya as the pivot point
Against that backdrop, Kenya offers France several strategic advantages.
- It is not a former French colony, which means the bilateral relationship does not carry the specific historical grievances and psychological baggage of Françafrique.
- President Ruto is a Western‑oriented, pro‑market leader who hosted the 2023 African Climate Summit and has positioned Kenya as a continental hub for finance, tech, and infrastructure.
- Kenya sits on the Indian Ocean, a maritime corridor of growing geostrategic interest as global supply‑chain anxiety and great‑power competition intensify.
In advance of the summit, France and Kenya signed a five‑year defense cooperation agreement, and approximately 800 French soldiers arrived in the port city of Mombasa for joint training exercises. Macron has also invited Ruto to the G7 summit in France in June, a gesture of elevated bilateral status that Paris underlined by simultaneously revoking the invitation to South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, reportedly at Trump’s prompting.
That last move has made South Africa unlikely to attend the Nairobi summit, adding another layer of complexity to Macron’s courtship of the continent.
“Imperialist recolonization” — voices of dissent
Not everyone in Kenya is welcoming the summit.
A coalition of left‑wing parties, trade unions and civil‑society groups operating under the banner of the Pan‑African Social Action and Investment (PASAI) has organized protests ahead of the event, releasing a statement on April 17 calling the summit “a rebranded offensive of imperialist recolonization disguised behind the mask of environmental diplomacy and financial reform.”
The secretary‑general of the Communist Party Marxist–Kenya, Booker Omole, described the summit to Peoples Dispatch as “a war council of imperialism convened under the mask of diplomacy,” arguing that the sectors highlighted, climate finance, green energy, digital infrastructure, are “strategic areas through which foreign capital seeks to extract superprofits from African economies.”
Critics also point to the defense agreement with France as particularly troubling: the presence of 800 French troops in Mombasa ahead of ratification has sparked questions about parliamentary oversight and about whether Kenya is trading its foreign‑policy independence for bilateral financial incentives. A Kenyan academic quoted by Responsible Statecraft warns that the agreement’s terms “share the same paternalistic characteristics of earlier arrangements with West African states”, suggesting that whatever France calls its new Africa strategy, its structural DNA has not changed.
Macron’s rebranding effort and its limits
French officials have worked hard to reframe the event as something fundamentally different from past France–Africa summits.
The official name, “Africa Forward: Africa-France Partnerships for Innovation and Growth”, deliberately avoids words like “security” or “aid,” favoring a business‑focused vocabulary of investment, jobs, and climate. The French ambassador in Nairobi, Alexis Lamek, has publicly acknowledged that the summit must address questions of restitution and reparations, which the African Union has placed at the center of its engagement with former colonial powers.
France’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes the summit as an opportunity to “forge a new perspective on the relationship between Africa and France” and to give new generations “a new framework for reflection and action.” Those are the same phrases Paris has been using since Macron’s 2017 speech in Ouagadougou and the 2021 Montpellier summit, both of which generated significant goodwill without stemming the slide in French influence.
For many analysts, the Nairobi event is therefore more symptom than cure: a necessary adaptation to a changed reality, but one that has not yet grappled fully with the deeper question of whether France is “ready or willing to deal with its former African colonies on equal footing,” as political scientist Amy Niang has argued.
The strategic stakes for Kenya and the continent
For Kenya, co-hosting the summit carries both opportunity and risk.
- Opportunity: Business deals, new investment pledges and elevated diplomatic status. Ruto has been invited to the G7; Kenya is being positioned as a continental gateway for European capital in sectors from clean energy to digital infrastructure.
- Risk: Being seen as the African government that welcomed the “forces that his counterparts in West Africa denounced and expelled,” as Responsible Statecraft puts it, risks alienating pan‑African constituencies and smaller neighbors watching closely.
For the broader continent, the summit will be a test of whether African governments can extract genuinely different terms from France this time, or whether a change of venue and vocabulary amounts to the same old asymmetric relationship with a new Nairobi dateline.
Thirty heads of state are expected to attend, representing a continent that has grown more assertive in demanding sovereignty, fair trade, and genuine reparative partnerships. Whether Macron can convert Kenya’s hospitality into a credible reset with Africa, or whether the Sahel’s lesson will simply repeat itself further east, is the question that will define the Africa Forward Summit legacy long after the communiqués are signed.