As the U.S.-Africa Futures Summit came to an end, one question emerged with particular force: the United States appears to know what it wants from Africa. Does Africa know, with the same clarity, what it wants from the United States?
That question became sharper during the discussions on the future of US-Africa relations. The US representative to the African Union spoke about more than twenty years of US presence at the African Union. What was striking was what such presence produces: institutional knowledge, political intelligence and an understanding of where interests lie, where opportunities exist and how they can be pursued.
The United States has done that work.
Its proposition to Africa is becoming increasingly clear. It wants trade, investment and economic opportunity. It wants security and political stability. It wants access to a continent whose markets, resources and geopolitical importance are growing. And it increasingly frames that engagement less through the old donor-recipient relationship and more through trade, deals and mutual economic benefit. There is nothing unusual about the United States pursuing its interests. What should concern us is Africa entering this new phase without an equally rigorous exercise of defining its own.
We are already seeing this tested. Uganda signed a five year health agreement with the United States involving approximately US$1.7 billion in American commitments alongside increased domestic health spending. The agreement extends to disease surveillance, health information systems and data sharing. Other African governments responded differently. Ghana rejected a proposed agreement following concerns over sensitive health data. Zimbabwe’s negotiations broke down amid concerns over health data and biological resources, while Zambia pushed back against provisions on data and attempts to connect health financing with access to critical minerals.
These are not isolated disagreements over technical clauses. Health financing, data, biological resources, minerals, trade and security are increasingly meeting at the same negotiating table. African governments must therefore be clear about the health priorities they are negotiating to protect, not only the financing they are negotiating to secure.
Sexual and reproductive health makes this particularly important. Contraception, safe abortion care and adolescent sexual and reproductive health remain public health and human rights.
Obligations even when they carry little political or strategic value for an external partner. African states have already made commitments on these questions, including through the Maputo Protocol. Those commitments cannot become contingent on the political preferences of whichever administration occupies Washington.
This takes us beyond health and into the meaning of sovereignty itself. Sovereignty cannot end with the assertion that Africa should determine its own future. Its real test is the capacity to do so. That means knowing what we want from a negotiation, understanding the value of what we bring to it, establishing what we will not concede, and having the institutional and financial capacity to defend those choices afterwards. It also requires greater solidarity across the continent. African states should not do so in isolation when shared positions, information and negotiating intelligence can strengthen the hand of each. A state that can reject an external condition but cannot sustain the programme affected by that decision has asserted sovereignty politically without securing it institutionally.
This is where Africa has work to do.
Fifty-four countries will not have identical interests. But some interests become weaker when negotiated country by country. Health data, disease surveillance, pharmaceutical manufacturing, supply chains, critical minerals, financing, and regional security all extend beyond national borders. Treating them entirely as bilateral transactions can diminish the collective value Africa brings to the negotiating table.
Africa’s history makes this particularly important. The continent’s problem has never been an absence of value. Africa has had land, labour, minerals, markets and geopolitical importance for centuries. The recurring problem has been the terms under which the value is identified, priced, negotiated and transferred.
Today, the assets also include health and genomic data, pharmaceutical markets, and manufacturing capacity. If those seeking access understand their value better, coordinate their interests better, and negotiate more strategically than those who hold them, changing the vocabulary from aid to trade will not fundamentally alter the relationship.
Aid can produce dependency. Trade can reproduce extraction. Investment can build domestic capacity or simply move value elsewhere. None of these relationships becomes inherently equal because we call it a partnership. Equality is produced in the terms. The United States has every right to define its interests in Africa and negotiate for them. African governments and institutions must become equally serious about Africa’s own.
The future of US-Africa relations should therefore not be another conversation about what America is prepared to give Africa. It should begin with Africa defining what it brings, what it needs, and what it will not trade away. The United States has come to the table with an agenda. Africa must come with one too.
Moses Mulumba, Director General and Jessica Oga, Head of Ubingwa Think Tank at Afya na Haki