Africa in 2025: 10 trends to look out for
With a quarter of the 21st century gone and halfway to 2050, when one in four people on the planet will be African, 2025 is a year of stock-taking and momentum shift for the continent
Happy New Year.
I hope you had a relaxing Christmas holiday. Here’s hoping that this year is a rewarding one for you and yours.
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2025 is already shaping up to be no less eventful on the African continent than previous years. Two weeks in, Ghana has completed a transition from one administration to another, the president of São Tomé and Príncipe fired his entire government and a deadly gun attack on Chad’s presidential palace may have been a coup attempt. If you’re struggling to keep up or did not know that some or all these events took place, you aren’t alone.
Just before the conclusion of 2024, I wrote a piece for World Politics Review previewing 2025 as a year of momentum for Africa and I encourage you to read it alongside this post. There is a lot that did not make it into that piece but which will be newsworthy and impactful this year. Some might not seem obviously consequential or attract a ton of media coverage but will nonetheless affect African lives and livelihoods. I will keep close tabs on those and other issues and write about many of them in these pages and possibly elsewhere.
I look forward to fulfilling my contribution to the creation of more, better African-led knowledge this year. For those who leaned on me last year to be better informed about a poorly understood but deeply consequential part of the world, I hope that I can meet your expectations in 2025.
Without further ado, here is a list of 10 trends that I will be looking out for this year.
Will 2025 indicate that Africa’s ‘Year of Elections’ in 2024 was a flash in the pan? Major elections are set to take place in Cameroon, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Malawi, Tanzania and Togo. Mali’s military junta signaled last year that it might schedule elections in 2025 to end its “transitional” rule while in neighboring Guinea, Gen. Mamady Doumbouya announced on Dec. 31 that his regime will launch a roadmap for a return to civilian rule that will conclude with national and local elections. Although it did not commit to a timetable, the junta suggested that elections could take place later this year.
If 2024 was seen as a banner year for electoral democracy in Africa after opposition candidates and parties performed well in competitive, credible elections in Ghana, Senegal, Botswana and South Africa, this year could prove to be a disappointing anticlimax. In Cameroon, Paul Biya is more likely to die in office than lose an election in a country where every major state institution is firmly under his thumb.
Ivorian President Alassane Ouattara is favored to win a fourth term in office due to the combination of a strong domestic economy, a divided opposition, a perception among many citizens that the country is on the right track after decades of societal instability and lingering goodwill from last year’s Africa Cup of Nations, when the acclaim Côte d'Ivoire received for hosting the tournament was capped by its national team’s Cinderella run to the championship.
President Samia Suluhu Hassan has consolidated her control of Tanzania’s ruling Chama Cha Mapinduzi party — and the government by extension — since succeeding her predecessor, John Magufuli, who died in 2021. Her election to a five-year term is close to certain not least due to the brutal crackdown Tanzanian authorities have launched in recent years against the opposition and other government critics.
Ditto for Togolese President Faure Gnassingbé, who is all but guaranteed to secure a fifth term in office after lawmakers passed a constitutional amendment which stipulated, among other things, that the president will no longer be elected by universal suffrage but by members of parliament. In Mali and Guinea, there is a strong possibility that if presidential elections are held this year, the generals who currently hold power will win.
Malawi might turn out to be a wildcard. It would be an understatement to say that President Lazarus Chakwera has been nothing short of a disappointment in office. His main opponent in the September 16 presidential election will be his predecessor, Peter Mutharika, who Chakwera defeated in June 2020 in a rerun of the 2019 presidential election after Malawi’s Constitutional Court annulled the result of that vote citing evidence of widespread irregularities. Many citizens are dreading the prospect of having to choose between two unpopular, uninspiring candidates and some Malawian civil society groups have pointed to the paltry rates of voter registration for the 2025 general election as a premonition for low turnout.
Will Africa’s falling giants please stand up? For the better part of the last 10 years, Africa’s heavyweights have been the sick men of their neighborhood. Nigeria, which officially slipped last year from being the largest economy in Africa to fourth place, has experienced what amounts to a lost decade of economic growth. South Africa is locked in a joblessness crisis that underscores deep fissures in its political economy.
Public discontent is growing in Egypt — the International Monetary Fund’s second-largest debtor by amount — over economic hardship linked to austerity measures imposed by the government, a currency crisis and the ongoing conflict in neighboring Gaza. In Kenya, the social unrest stirred up last year by a tax bill President William Ruto said was crafted to reduce the country’s debt obligations underscored the difficult balance he must strike between reassuring Kenya’s creditors on one hand and the timely investments in social development that he must make on the other.
By contrast, many smaller African countries have had some of the fastest-growing economies in the world in recent years. But their gains have been stymied by the malaise of their bigger, richer neighbors who hold so much importance for regional efforts in trade, logistics and security. The economic underperformance of Africa’s heavyweights adversely affects their ability to anchor their respective neighborhoods, an outcome that has had geopolitical ramifications. If Africa is to maximize any opportunities that present themselves in the next 12 months, it needs countries like Nigeria, South Africa, Kenya and Egypt to step up to the plate.
The future of ECOWAS. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) will mark the 50th anniversary of its founding in May 2025. But that festivity will be dampened by the departure of Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger—three of its founding members—from the bloc after West African heads of state approved their withdrawal from the regional group following their announcement in January 2024 that they will pull out of ECOWAS. The bloc’s leaders offered a transitional period of six months during which the three states can be readmitted into the group.
The departure of three of its original members is undoubtedly a big deal, given the prominent place ECOWAS occupies in Africa’s regional institutional architecture. Some commentators have argued that the withdrawal of the three Central Sahelian countries will deal a heavy blow to West African regional integration. There have been references to “Ecowexit” and “West Africa’s Brexit moment,” while some others have projected that ECOWAS will break up altogether.
You would not be surprised to read that I do not concur with these rather apocalyptic forecasts. Life in West Africa has always existed above and beyond the nation-state, ECOWAS and other formal institutions whose impact on the daily lives of the region’s people was never resolute to begin with. Trade and commercial networks that West Africans depend on for their livelihoods date back centuries—well before the creation of modern African nation-states—and will not disappear simply because Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have withdrawn from ECOWAS.
The bloc’s leaders cannot escape the reality that their constituents retain economic, familial and cultural ties with millions of people in Mali, Niger and Burkina Faso. Whatever happens to bilateral and multilateral relations among formal state and regional institutions, the ties that bind ordinary West Africans will not sever. And that is without considering the likelihood that ECOWAS—whose leaders recognize the existence of those indissoluble bonds—maintains dialogue with the three Sahelian states with a view to readmitting them at some point in the future.
Depending on what is meant by “breakup,” I do not believe that this will be the organization’s fate given broad, deep connectivities that link the West Africa region and which are expanding in scope and size, within and without ECOWAS. In any case, the focus on ECOWAS as opposed to the people and customs which make up the region is fallacious and obscures a fundamental point: ECOWAS is not synonymous with West Africa. Whether or not the organization dissolves, the geographic region will remain intact as will the desire by its people to integrate and retain their linkages that have spanned centuries. That, and not necessarily the future of a regional bloc that had several iterations before its creation 50 years ago by coup leaders, is the bottom line.
Over the coming months, I shall work up more articles about ECOWAS, West Africa and its affairs in which I will delve extensively into these issues. Offline, I will be participating in engagements leading up to the commemoration of ECOWAS’ 50th anniversary, including an essay series I am co-editing. It’s an exciting project I am delighted to be part of and I look forward to sharing more details about it in due course.
Economic growth in 2025 must be accompanied by industrialization and social development. Africa’s GDP growth is projected to rise in 2025 by more than 4%, and 10 African countries will be among the 20 fastest growing economies in the world this year. Some of them will be in East Africa, the continent’s star performer of recent times. In West Africa, Côte d'Ivoire and Senegal are expected to grow at rates of up to 7% and 10% respectively, while Nigeria and Ghana may hover around 3.7%.
Africa’s impressive growth projections could turn out to be a mirage given that they are unlikely to keep up with inflation and population growth, nor will they cause a major dent in poverty and unemployment. Debt sustainability will also be something to keep an eye on, given how many African countries are facing ballooning debt burdens.
Given Africa’s youthful, growing population, my focus in 2025 will be on the steps African policymakers take to boost agricultural productivity, accelerate industrialization and improve logistics, given their transformative potential for economies across the continent. Energy- and mineral-producing states like Angola, DRC, Botswana and Libya will be worth watching amid growing demand for African commodities and “critical minerals.”
I’ll be keeping an eye on the steps taken by institutions like ECOWAS, the East African Community (EAC) and the African Development Bank (AfDB) to boost industrialization, infrastructural development and connectivity as part of the AU’s Agenda 2063. I’m keen to see how much the long-discussed Abidjan-Lagos Corridor highway can reach some degree of fruition in 2025, and it is a project that will keep my attention this year.
Geopolitics, international relations and global partnerships. 2025 began with a report that French troops will withdraw from Côte d'Ivoire, signaling that the decline of Paris’ influence in West Africa is irreversible. Some commentators believe that Russia’s footprint on the continent will weaken after the collapse of the regime of former Syrian President Bashar Al-Assad, which Moscow backed. Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi just completed a visit to Chad, Congo-Brazzaville, Namibia and Nigeria, in maintenance of a 35-year tradition in which Beijing’s top diplomat visits Africa for their first overseas trip of the year.
Turkey and the Gulf states are punching well above their weight on the continent, expanding their influence using a range of tools and methods. The U.K. is close to being irrelevant as a foreign actor. Did I mention that Donald Trump will return to the White House in a few days, and many African leaders seem relaxed and even excited about that?
In a year that will mark the 80th anniversary of the founding of the United Nations, the global diplomatic circuit will be a busy one for Africa in 2025 beginning with the AU’s election of a new senior leadership team. South Africa, which holds the presidency of the G20, will host the annual summit of the group’s leaders in Johannesburg later this year. It has said that it will champion a pan-continental program that puts Africa’s development “at the heart of the global economic agenda.”
To that end, South Africa’s priorities during its G20 presidency are in line with what African governments and institutions have advocated in recent years i.e. debt sustainability, climate change, critical minerals and reform of multilateral institutions and the global financial architecture. It will likely struggle to make meaningful progress on those issues given external factors like Trump’s return to power, but South Africa has little choice but to use this unique opportunity on the world stage to shore up the mantle of continental leadership it regularly claims for itself.
Interstate tensions between Nigeria and Niger, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Rwanda, Mali and Algeria as well as Ethiopia’s distinct but overlapping disputes with Somalia and Egypt will have important ramifications for security, economics and energy. In the past few months, I have written several posts about geopolitics and Africa’s international relations which have been among my most read articles. You can expect more of them this year.
Africa’s creative economy will be bigger and better in 2025. From the stories told on-screen and in novels to the rhythms that inspire the world, African creative products will echo far and wide in 2025. Afrobeats megastars Davido and Burna Boy are poised to dominate music charts and streaming platforms with planned album releases in 2025. The likes of Ibrahim Mahama, Zanele Muholi and Aida Muluneh will continue to redefine what it means to create contemporary art. The authenticity and sustainability that has defined African fashion in recent years will be amplified.
African theater and filmmaking will scale new heights, thanks to adaptive technologies and homegrown communities leaning on each other for support. Chimamanda Adichie will mark her return to long-form fiction this year with her first novel in more than a decade. Oh, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has still never won the Nobel Prize in Literature.1
Many of you apparently loved my review of 2024 in African film, literature and music (especially the playlist!) so you’ll be getting an encore at the end of the year. Until then, keep an eye out for intermittent musings on the way Africans are telling stories, entertaining global audiences and boosting Africa’s creative economy.
The modern processes of state formation in Africa. Popular claims that Africa is experiencing a setback of democracy are nonsensical, for reasons I’ve articulated in the past. But it is true that faith in civic norms and state institutions has regressed over the past decade.
Sit-tight leaders like Uganda’s Yoweri Museveni and Equatorial Guinea’s Teodoro Obiang Nguema have no desire or plan to step down from power, while Bénin’s Patrice Talon, DRC’s Felix Tshisekedi and Zimbabwe’s Emmerson Mnangagwa are rumored to be plotting third-term bids.
Intrastate conflicts in Africa have hampered the AU’s ability to silence the guns. Despite meaningful steps African states have taken to devolve powers to subnational units, most lack the institutional capacity to fully assume the responsibilities that come with subsidiarity.
65 years after the so-called Year of Africa, when 17 African countries gained independence from European colonizers, the logics of extraction, repression and plunder that were core to the creation of African nation-states by imperial powers are still intact. But important debates about political organization in Africa as well as the relationship between authority and constituent are happening across the continent, as seen in efforts toward constitutional reform in countries like Angola, Botswana, Nigeria and Zambia.
I’ll be keeping watch on their many dimensions in 2025 and sharing some of my thoughts here.
A jam-packed year of sports. 2025 is poised to be a grand year for African football, with domestic leagues, the African Nations Championship, Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, Club World Cup, Africa Football League, AFCON 2025 and the race to qualify for the expanded 2026 FIFA World Cup certain to keep fans spellbound.
But football is hardly the only sport in which African athletes will shoot for glory. They will take part in big events in basketball, cycling, track and field, rugby, badminton, beach volleyball, handball, fencing and archery.
The World Athletic Championships in Tokyo, in which runners like Botswana’s Olympic gold medalist Letsile Tebogo and Kenyans Faith Kipyegon and Emmanuel Wanyonyi will look to tick off new achievements, will be a fantastic spectacle. Rwanda’s hosting of the Road World Championship — which visits Africa for the first time — should be super cool. D’Tigress, the Nigeria women’s basketball team, is aiming to win a fifth consecutive title at the 2025 Women’s AfroBasket tournament in Abidjan.
I shall be paying close attention to sports administration and Africa’s burgeoning sport economy as an incentive for economic growth and social development. The business of sports in Africa reached new heights last year, marked by growing interest in African sports as well as record investments in infrastructure, grassroots programs and strategic partnerships.
According to Patrice Motsepe, the president of the Confederation of African football, an estimated 2 billion people watched AFCON 2023 in more than 180 countries. The tournament’s success underscored the potential for growth of African football and sports more broadly. The Basketball Africa League is an example of an impactful collaboration that could be built upon in other African sports.
Undoubtedly, there remain many challenges including insufficient funding, weakening sports pipelines, corruption in administration and a lack of vision. But these difficulties are not insurmountable, as shown by the many pockets of achievement one can see across the continent.
A quick word on sports administration. While the anger among many Nigerians that the national football federation yet again recruited a foreigner as the coach of the men's national team is understandable, the decision to hire Mali ex-international Éric Chelle is a tolerable one. It is disappointly rare for African football federations to hire coaches from other parts of the continent and that should change. Chelle, who led the Mali national team to the quarterfinal of AFCON 2023—coming literally minutes away from knocking out eventual champs Côte d'Ivoire—is no worse than the mediocre European coaches hired by the Nigeria Football Federation over the years. He should be given a chance to earn his stripes.
Africa’s renewed wave of protests and social movements. Amid an avalanche of challenges like poverty, unemployment, violent extremism, climate change and conflict that African states are failing to resolve, millions of Africans are turning to protests, social movements and other forms of civic organizing to achieve the social transformation they desire.
Last year, uprisings in Kenya, Nigeria and Senegal dominated the conversation about social discontent in Africa. But the current wave of protests has continuity from the past and dates back more than a decade, as I noted in a piece two years ago. The spike in protests and other forms of non-electoral participation illustrate the way in which economic stagnation, political paralysis and weakening society-state relations have converged in unpredictable ways and are placing strains on political systems across the continent.
For all the handwringing about a supposed decline of democracy in Africa, political organizing across the continent is experiencing something of a renaissance, suggesting that it is electoralism, and not democracy per se, that faces a crisis of legitimacy. I’ll try to make more sense of this in the coming months.
Incremental gains in tourism, continental integration and the free movement of African goods and people. As someone who spends a considerable amount of time traveling to and within different parts of Africa, the free movement of its people across continental borders is both a bugbear and a hobby horse. In theory, it has never been easier for Africans to visit other African countries. In practice, however, non-African travelers — particularly European and North American passport holders — find it easier to pass through African ports of entry than visitors from other parts of the continent.
Nearly a decade since the AU passport was launched, it has yet to be made widely available to African citizens. African governments talk a good game about boosting tourism and trade, as well as making their countries more attractive to foreign visitors. But far too many of them put up barriers that make it challenging for people and goods to enter their borders. African roads, skies and waterways are not easily linked to other parts of the continent.
However, the goal of an integrated, borderless Africa is getting closer to realization in visible and subtle ways. Many more countries are liberalizing their visa regimes by signing reciprocity agreements with other African nations, introducing visa-on-arrival policies and digitizing key aspects of the immigration process. Ghana recently announced that it had introduced visa-free travel to all Africans, becoming the fifth African country to do so.
In the West Africa region, the part of the continent I am most familiar with and in which I spend the largest amount of time, ECOWAS and its member states are quietly implementing measures to shore up regional protocols like the introduction of digital license and vehicle registration systems for drivers from other West African countries. The East African Tourist Visa, dear as it is, is an example that other continental blocs can emulate. Slowly but surely, Africa’s borders are opening to people from other parts of the continent.
Readers can expect more posts this year from me about African travel, tourism and free movement of people, goods and services across the continent.
Not that he needs it!