On 15 May 2026, Dr Vasu Gounden, Founder and Executive Director of ACCORD, delivered a keynote address at the Forward Africa Leaders Symposium (FALS) 2026 Continental Summit in Kigali, Rwanda. The high-level convening was co-hosted by Convene Africa, the Africa Business Council (AfBC), and the African Business Angels Network (ABAN), in collaboration with the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM).
Held under the theme “Strengthening Cross-Border Digital Infrastructure in Africa: Aligning Policy, Innovation and Capacity for Inclusive Development”, the Summit brought together leaders to shape Africa’s digital, economic, and governance future. The 2026 edition builds on the 2025 Symposium’s call to contextualise digital transformation within Africa’s unique realities.
Dr Gounden presented in the session on Building Digital States and Operationalising Digital Governance in Africa: Measuring Governance and Strengthening Peer Review in the Digital Age. His address drew on the APRM as an institutional anchor, examining how Member States can move from digital declarations to verifiable outcomes. The session featured a formal presentation of a governance framework, followed by a high-level expert panel interrogating the political, institutional, and technical conditions under which digital states take root — and the governance failures that stall them.
The session addressed foundational challenges at the heart of Africa’s digital transformation: critical infrastructure, including power grids, fibre backbone networks, data centres, and cross-border connectivity corridors, remains uneven, underinvested, and insufficiently governed. Without a stable infrastructure base, digital states cannot be built; without governance frameworks capable of managing that infrastructure at scale, they cannot endure. Structural barriers compound this challenge, including fragmented regulatory environments, weak institutional coordination, and a persistent gap between digital ambition and measurable delivery.
This follows the APRM’s adoption of e-governance as the sixth thematic area of its governance assessment framework, after which the Continental Secretariat launched a series of stakeholder engagements and strategic partnerships to support implementation of the African Union’s Digital Transformation Agenda.
A key policy recommendation from the 2025 Symposium, convened at NASDAQ in New York, was the urgency of defining digital transformation in ways that reflect Africa’s specific challenges, opportunities, and development realities. Leaders underscored the need for a context-specific pathway that addresses structural constraints, leverages comparative advantages, and ensures Africa’s competitiveness and inclusion in an era of rapid advances in AI and technology.
The 2026 Symposium was aimed at building consensus around digital infrastructure as the foundation of digital transformation and AI readiness, elevating the discourse from a technical discussion to a leadership, investment, and inclusive execution imperative and to generate actionable policy alignment, investment partnerships, and collaborative commitments toward an integrated African digital economy.
