Africa in a year of geopolitical turmoil

Eight geopolitical themes roiled Africa this year, focusing greater attention on the continent’s economic resilience

• At many levels, 2025 has been a year of extraordinary change and uncertainty. US President Donald Trump has driven much of the year’s geopolitical unease, hastening the unfolding of a new, ‘post-American’, order. This year’s events have, in many ways, validated the views that we expressed in this 2023 thematic, in which we argued that a new geopolitical paradigm (and era) is emerging, and that the tectonic shifts that this creates will trigger bouts of instability and spawn a plethora of new risks, while also offering the potential to spur new growth vectors that could boost human welfare. In this era, “change”, as the Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote, “is the only constant”.
• In this brief note we identify eight areas in which Africa has been affected, and could continue to be affected, by the US’s disruptive positioning this year, as well as the wider geopolitical reordering that preceded President Trump’s return to office. Throughout this note, we emphasise the opportunities for Africa that we believe to be implicit within this unfolding terrain, as well as the encouraging signs of economic resilience that the continent has displayed in 2025 despite the largely exogenous turmoil that it has had to endure.
• (1) The hastening of the multipolar world. Though it has been forming for some time, this year has considerably hastened the shift from a US-led unipolar environment to a broader multipolar configuration. As the FT’s Alec Russell argued in 2023, the new geopolitical order resembles an “a la carte world” as opposed to the set menu available to developing nations in the prior order. Certain dramatic trade and investment dynamics have reflected the extent of this shift for Africa. Gulf states, which are at the “epicentre of multipolar entrepreneurship”, have dramatically increased trade and investment links with and across Africa in recent years. According to the European Council on Foreign Relations, in 2022 and 2023 Gulf states “collectively funnelled nearly USD113bn of FDI” into [Africa], exceeding their total investments over the previous decade (USD102bn)” (notably, Gulf state investment into Africa during this period was three-times larger than total Chinese investment in Africa). In 2023, total trade between the UAE and Africa amounted to $83bn, compared to $69bn in US-Africa trade. There is also building interest in Turkey’s ‘return’ to Africa. And there are clear opportunities for the EU in deepening commercial engagements in Africa, too, as a collective counterweight to tensions that have developed with the Trump administration. This dynamic is well reflected in the robust support the EU provided for South Africa’s G20 ambitions this year (in the context of President Trump’s crude rejection of the same), as well as the EU’s 2025 Strategic Foresight Report. Last year, the BRICS grouping expanded to include two additional African countries (Egypt and Ethiopia), as well as Iran, the UAE and Indonesia.
• This distributed architecture enhances Africa’s bargaining leverage. As the global system evolves toward bespoke partnerships rather than rigid blocs, African states can negotiate based on market size, demographic scale and resource endowment. For investors seeking diversification in an age of uncertainty, Africa’s long-duration fundamentals offer an increasingly compelling counterweight to volatility elsewhere.
• Further, this geopolitical recalibration coincides with what may be described as a “geographic arc of prosperity” linking Africa, the Middle East and the Far East — a corridor of shared interest in logistics, capital flows, manufacturing, and trade. Seven of the world’s ten fastest-growing trade corridors now bypass the US and instead link Asia to Africa and the Gulf. In a world fragmenting into curated alliances, Africa’s partnerships are maturing, particularly with regions seeking dependable long-term investment destinations. The continent’s collective GDP, nearing USD3 trillion, positions it not as a peripheral actor but as a foundational pillar of global growth over the next decade. At the same time, as we argued in this pre-COP29 report, and as outlined in this Chatham House submission, Africa is increasingly, albeit gradually, exerting more influence in global governance, thus amplifying its geopolitical standing.
• (2) Trade ruptures. The Trump Administration’s assault on global multilateralism and trade relations has reverberated across Africa this year. As argued by our Africa Macro team earlier this year, the effects have been direct (given the elevated tariffs on African exports to the US, and the potential for AGOA to be cancelled) and indirect (resulting from the uncertainties resulting from President Trump’s irascible trade approach).
• In our view, the US’s trade posture has created an opportunity for the deepening of trade ties between Africa and other countries now deemed to be more ‘reliable’ partners. China has been particularly assertive in this regard with its offer to remove all tariffs for exports from all African countries with which it holds diplomatic ties. Despite facing some of the harshest tariffs from the Trump Administration, China’s trade surplus exceeded $1 trillion in the first 11 months of this year (a record high), led by elevated non-US shipments. Stepping back, China’s industrial modernisation drive—anchored in upgrading traditional sectors while fast-tracking next-generation technologies—has reshaped its trade posture. And Africa sits at the heart of this realignment. Chinese exports to the continent have surged 25% year-to-date, hitting $216bn, while imports stagnate—widening Africa’s trade deficit with China to a record USD100bn. Today, one-quarter of all goods imported into Africa originate from China, rising to 40–50% in larger economies. This is not opportunism, but strategy: Beijing is embedding itself through infrastructure investment, long-term commercial ties, and diplomatic positioning as a development-oriented partner, contrasting itself with what it portrays as a chaotic US. Indeed, Africa is emerging as the primary absorption basin for China’s productivity-upgrade surplus, a shift that will define the continent’s economic trajectory for the rest of the decade. For Africa, the upside is access to affordable technology and industrial inputs, while the risks relate, amongst other factors, to deepening dependency and the erosion of local manufacturing.
• Meanwhile, this year’s trade pressures have intensified the need for Africa to elevate intra-regional trade to provide greater protection from exogenous geopolitical and economic ruptures. The broader geoeconomic fragmentation risks emanating from the US-China rivalry (and which we discussed here) continue to be a concern for Africa, hastening the need for deeper regional ties. There is some cause for cheer in this regard. According to this African Export-Import Bank report, total formal trade within the continent has “noticeably increased” since the operationalisation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in 2021. In 2023, intra-African trade rose to $192.2bn, accounting for almost 15% of Africa’s total trade. UNECA projects this to increase by 35% by 2045, following the full implementation of the AfCFTA. In our view, the AfCFTA’s integration agenda aligns with global investor priorities: large consumer markets, diversified supply chains and rising middle-class spending — projected to reach USD2.5 trillion annually by 2030. This structural scale strengthens Africa’s resilience against external trade shocks and enhances its appeal as a long-term manufacturing and logistics hub. A key implication of this is that Africa’s investment story is becoming increasingly tied to integration, scale and diversification — principles at the heart of the AfCFTA. With a unified market of 1.4 billion people, predictable regulatory regimes and emerging regional value chains, Africa is positioning itself as a partner of choice in the reshaped global economy. However, to more deeply harness these advantages, greater efforts will be required to lessen the towering non-tariff barriers that continue to hobble intra-African trade flows.
• (3) A new emphasis on African resources – with critical minerals at the forefront. As outlined by the US Chamber of Commerce in this recent report, the US faces a “defining moment” in its ability to access critical minerals to support its defence, energy, and technological ambitions, and that “with its vast reserves of critical minerals, Africa stands at the heart of this effort” given the continent’s “immense” potential to drive the global energy transition and AI revolution. President Trump’s efforts to broker a peace deal in DRC underline these critical mineral ambitions, while elevating conversation on the continent around how such resources can be more effectively harnessed to ensure maximum domestic and regional value add. Trends towards greater critical mineral beneficiation in countries such as Zimbabwe are encouraging in this regard. However, the risks of exploitation remain high, as do the perils of Africa being embroiled in proxy geopolitical battles (infused by the overarching US-China rivalry, as we discussed here) that could be connected to its critical mineral wealth. In this regard, this US Chamber/US Africa Business Center report on US-Africa critical minerals partnerships specifically cites China’s “overwhelming” control of between 65% and 90% of global processing for key metals such as lithium, cobalt, nickel, and copper and how this constitutes an ongoing risk to US economic and security interests.
• Linked to the multipolar themes outlined earlier in this note, the US will find a more crowded terrain in its effort to elevate African critical mineral partnerships. For instance, the DRC-Zambia Copperbelt, Tanzania’s nickel belt and Mali’s spodumene deposits feature in every OEM battery roadmap. With US reliability in question, European, Japanese and Korean buyers (amongst others) are offering decade-long prepayment deals at fixed price floors, giving producers leverage to insist on local beneficiation. Battery precursor plants are now under feasibility study in DRC, Namibia and Ghana. Meanwhile, a green-hydrogen pipeline is taking shape: Egypt, Mauritania, Namibia and South Africa have signed over $40bn in MOUs in this regard. In a fragmented world, energy-hungry Europe and East Asia are competing to subsidise these projects, improving Africa’s chances of retaining equity stakes—targeting 30% local ownership versus less than 10% in legacy LNG. In such an environment, Africa will need to bargain more shrewdly, with an emphasis, perhaps, on “tech diplomats” to steer the continent away from the risks attached to such a new scramble for the continent’s resources.
• In this sense, Africa’s resource advantage is not merely geological – it is strategic. The continent’s minerals align with megatrends: decarbonisation, transport electrification, and AI hardware expansion. As advanced economies race to reduce over-reliance on single-country processing hubs, Africa’s role in the global minerals matrix is shifting from optional to indispensable. This dynamic strengthens Africa’s case for value-addition at home, especially as its demographic dividend and improving logistics nodes create the workforce and infrastructure for downstream industries.
• (4) The climate conversation. Predictably, President Trump swiftly withdrew the US (again) from the Paris Agreement soon after commencing his second term in office. Under his steer, the US has withdrawn its climate support for SA (through the JETP programme) and advocated for a fossil-fuel-heavy approach towards securing US energy security. In response, various financial institutions have reduced their Net Zero commitments, affecting already insufficient funding for climate change and adaptation across the developing world, and Africa in particular. This, coupled with the pivot in global attention to pronounced and ongoing conflicts, has severely compromised the momentum required for the UN’s net zero targets to be reached. As outlined in the State of Climate Action 2025 report, none of the 45 indicators of climate action are on track to meet the UN’s 2030 45% reduction target. Meanwhile, climate records continue to be breached, with disproportionate harm across Africa.
• However, despite these considerable setbacks, there appears still to be firm multilateral commitment to prioritising climate action. Last year’s UN Summit of the Future reflected global commitment to coordinating responses to combating climate change. And in defiance of the Trump Administration, SA managed to secure a G20 Leaders’ Summit Declaration last month which made elaborate mention of the need for urgent and collective action to address mounting climate-related risks. However, this remains an area in which Africa will suffer disproportionately, forcing governments across the continent to allocate more fiscal resources to climate adaptation and mitigation, as well as responding to mounting climate catastrophes.
• (5) USAID’s withdrawal. One of the bluntest of President Trump’s second term orders was the withdrawal of virtually all USAID global support. This has had a profound effect across several African nations. Nigeria alone lost more than $600m in health funding, equivalent to over one-fifth of its total annual health budget, while US support funded over one-third of Botswana’s and around 17% of SA’s HIV programmes. Meanwhile, European aid has been slashed as countries in the region direct more resources to defence spending, drawing away from social and foreign assistance (in other words, ‘guns before butter’). Some foreign partners have elevated their assistance to Africa to offset these losses, and to capitalise on the political opportunities that the US’s withdrawal has presented to them. And some US assistance is being restored under a new, and more transactional, foreign assistance approach (as reflected by the $2.5bn Health Cooperation Framework signed earlier this month between the US and Kenya). Yet these flows are insufficient to offset the dramatic toll of USAID’s abrupt departure. This carries considerable humanitarian implications but also focuses greater attention on the building aspiration to reach “health sovereignty” in Africa, as well as to elevate the continent’s representation in the governance of global health institutions. As Chatham House Associate Fellow Ebere Okereka argues, “the withdrawal of the US has exposed the brittleness of the old model. It has also created an extraordinary opportunity”. And that “the measure of success will not be the size of new pledges at donor conferences in New York or Geneva. It will be whether, in five years, health priorities are debated and decided in Abuja, Addis Ababa, Kigali, Nairobi and Pretoria, and whether African governments are paying a growing share of the bill. If that happens, this crisis will be remembered as a turning point, when Africa began to define its own path towards health sovereignty”.
• At least, the vacuum created by this withdrawal comes at a moment when Africa’s investment and growth fundamentals are improving. The structural drivers underpinning Africa’s rise are no longer donor-dependent; they are endogenous, propelled by local innovation, metropolitan consumption hubs, and increasingly assertive regional integration. As Western aid retracts, Africa’s economic centres – Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, Johannesburg – are becoming loci of policy autonomy rather than aid dependence. In this sense, the turbulence in donor architecture is not solely a risk; it is also a catalyst for sovereignty.
• (6) Democracy is under sustained assault. All credible global democracy assessments point to a consistent and alarming trend of democratic backsliding across the world over the past five years. For instance: in its 2025 Democracy Report, the V-Dem Institute outlines that the level of democracy for the average world citizen is back to 1985 [levels]” and that “democracy is at its lowest level in over 50 years”. And the International IDEA’s 2025 Global State of Democracy report emphasises how political developments in the US are “shaking long-held assumptions about democratic resilience and multilateralism”. Global economic power also continues to shift from developed (broadly democratic) nations to developing (and often, but not exclusively, authoritarian) nations. In this environment, external pressure on countries across the developing world to democratise as a condition for financial or political support is weakening considerably, particularly considering the transactional foreign policy approach pursued by President Trump.
• This has implications for Africa. Across the continent this year, there has been vibrant and vigorous engagement with democracy and its alternatives. This has ranged from criticism over Cameroon’s embedded gerontocracy, to powerful Gen Z-led disruptions in Tanzania and Madagascar, and the rising appeal of charismatic military leaders, such as Burkina Faso’s interim leader Captain Ibrahima Traoré. Though much of the continent languishes in the lower rungs of global democratic rankings, there continue to be marked gains. In 2025, SA and Nigeria were both elevated in the V-Dem assessment, with SA now ranked as one of only 29 Liberal Democracies in the world, and Nigeria upgraded to an Electoral Democracy. And Afrobarometer data reflects strong support across Africa for democracy, too. Across the 34 African countries included in its 2024/25 survey round, two-thirds of respondents stated that they regard democracy to be “preferable to any other kind of government” (notably, 79% of Tanzanians responded in this way) and 67% of respondents across these countries reject military rule. These are of course complex and evolving themes, as SA reflects. In the latest Afrobarometer survey, 49% of South Africans registered their support for army rule, up from 28% in 2022 (and this in the context of SA’s democratic deepening since last year’s seismic election results).
• What is emerging is a duality: on the one hand, democratic fragility; on the other, economic resilience. The continent’s youth – more than 60% of whom are under 25 – represent both a political wildcard and an economic engine. By 2050, Africa’s working-age population will have expanded by more than 620 million people, providing a foundation for sustained growth if governance institutions can keep pace. This “youth dividend” is already reshaping financial services, entrepreneurship, and political participation. As digital access widens, young Africans are demanding accountability - even in states where formal democratic institutions lag. Thus, while governance challenges persist, demographic forces are deepening Africa’s long-term economic allure.
• (7) Conflict is on the rise. Another disturbing feature of the current global environment is the surge in armed conflict. According to the Peace Research Institute Oslo (PRIO), the world is experiencing a “surge in violence not seen since the post-World War II era”. In 2024, PRIO recorded the highest number of state-based armed conflicts in over seven decades (Figure 1). Two major wars have dominated global headlines in this regard: the war in Gaza and the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine. However, Africa has not been spared the instability. It is estimated that the ongoing war in Sudan has led to the displacement of over 12m people and left 30.4m people, more than half of the country’s population, in need of humanitarian support. According to PRIO analysis, Africa was the region with the highest number of state-based conflicts in 2024, while the continent also experienced “a sharp increase in non-state conflicts in 2024, reversing several years of decline and once again becoming the continent with the highest number of such conflicts” (Figure 2). Responses to such conflicts has in certain cases been complicated by geopolitical factors. In response to Western efforts to isolate it on the global stage after its invasion of Ukraine, Russia has ramped up engagements with various African states, particularly across the coup-prone Sahel region. And, informed by its broader geopolitical and strategic ambitions, the UAE has been accused of providing considerable support to Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in its ongoing war against the Sudan Armed Forces (SAF).
• To be sure, security and migration risks are mounting as Sahelian chaos collides with European panic. America’s drone withdrawal from Niger and Chad leaves an intelligence gap now contested by Russia’s Africa Corps, Gulf-funded mercenaries and Turkish Bayraktar drones. The downside is grim: externalised conflict and coup risk in Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger remain high, with displacement potentially topping seven million people by 2026. Yet coastal nodes such as Accra, Dakar and Cotonou are positioning themselves as stability arbitrage destinations, attracting climate-tech and garment investment keen on “near-Sahel” labour without Sahel risk. Europe, facing election cycles in 2025-26, will likely pay migration premiums—budget support and debt swaps—to Tunisia, Egypt, Senegal and even Morocco to bottle up transit routes. That, too, is a geopolitical rent that African negotiators can capture.
• Conflict’s economic spillovers also reverberate in capital markets. As global uncertainty intensifies, gold’s rise above USD4,000/oz reflects investors’ flight to safe assets. Meanwhile, Africa’s commodity exporters – from gold-rich Ghana to copper-dependent Zambia – benefit cyclically even as they confront structural vulnerabilities. For countries navigating conflict or post-conflict transitions, mineral demand linked to renewable energy and AI hardware provides a rare opportunity: a chance to turn extractive sectors into platforms for industrial upgrading and local beneficiation. Stability, therefore, is not merely a peace dividend; it is a precondition to capturing a share of the 21st-century minerals value chain.
• (8) The exponential and ongoing rise of AI. As is well-known, the race for AI dominance between the US and China is accelerating, driving profound investments in AI technology and spurring other knock-on geopolitical sites of contestation. There are, as this ISS AI event hosted in Ethiopia earlier this year identified, profound opportunities for Africa if the implementation of AI is accelerated. However, the risks (to employment, and global wealth inequality) are acute, too. As this year’s evolving AI conversation has shown, African policymakers will need to rapidly respond to these changes, building the skills and regulatory guardrails required to manage this sensitive terrain. 
• Across the continent, AI adoption is increasingly visible in payments, logistics, agriculture and healthcare, echoing the broader surge in Africa’s digital economy. Mastercard estimates that AI will contribute USD4.5bn to African GDP this year — modest in global terms, yet indicative of the continent’s growing absorptive capacity for frontier technologies. Demography and digital connectivity form the continent’s internal growth engine. Africa’s population will likely hit 2.4bn by 2050, but the sweet spot is 2025–35, as dependency ratios fall and urbanisation exceeds 45%. Smartphone penetration is already above 65%. Rapid 5G rollout in Nigeria, Kenya and Egypt, coupled with undersea cables like Google’s Umoja and Meta’s 2Africa (landing in 2026), is decoupling Africa’s digital future from US tech politics. Chinese, Emirati and European vendors are filling any Huawei gaps. Fintech and SME financing—real-time payments via M-Pesa clones and Nigeria’s instant transfers—are growing at 25-30% annually, fast enough to offset retreating US venture capital. Put simply, as digital infrastructure expands – undersea cables, 5G rollout, and fast-growing fintech ecosystems – Africa is well positioned to leverage AI as a productivity catalyst in the decade ahead.
• Encouragingly, Africa’s economic narrative has remained surprisingly durable despite the strains and uncertainties. While geopolitical tremors have unsettled capital flows and trade dynamics, the continent’s structural foundations — demography, integration, technology diffusion and urbanisation — are quietly strengthening. Africa’s real GDP is expected to grow above 4% in both 2025 and 2026, outperforming global averages of around 3%. Unlike previous cycles driven by commodity exuberance, this momentum rests on sturdier anchors: a young workforce, the expansion of digital services, and rising domestic demand across metropolitan corridors. Investors, seeking certainty in a volatile world, are recalibrating their portfolios towards regions offering diversification and long-duration consumption - and Africa is steadily earning its place among these jurisdictions. Of course, these opportunities are not assured. The key condition is governance. External realignment offers rents, but it also potentially fuels corruption and militarisation. Countries that institutionalise transparent royalty regimes, sovereign-wealth rules and election integrity, amongst other factors, will ride the post-American wave. Those that fail could merely swap old dependencies for new ones – succumbing to the risks, rather than harnessing the opportunities, of the unfolding new era.

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