You can now stream GLF Africa 2025 on demand.
Humanity is facing a triple crisis of land degradation, biodiversity loss and the climate crisis – and the effects are being felt around the world.
And despite having little responsibility for these problems, Africa is disproportionately suffering the consequences.
Now, there is the added turmoil of a global financial system turned on its head by trade tariffs, conflict and cuts to aid budgets.
Despite these challenges, people across Africa are looking to build a thriving economy based on nature – offering lessons for the world on how to create more regenerative systems.
Last week, over 2,300 attendees from 122 countries gathered in Nairobi, Kenya, and online to explore how nature can power Africa’s present and future.
Here are our five key takeaways from GLF Africa 2025 to help the world innovate, restore and prosper.
The current model isn’t working in Africa because it was never designed to.
“Here’s the uncomfortable truth: Africa’s development blueprint is not African,” said Sellah Bogonko, co-founder and CEO of Jacob’s Ladder Africa.
“It’s a worn-out photocopy of the Global North’s playbook – complete with its triumphs, yes, but also its deep and dangerous mistakes.”
Africa needs a new, unapologetically African model that focuses on regeneration rather than exploitation and includes the natural world by default.
“We are operating in a state where the economy has been given more prominence over nature – yet nature sustains the economy,” said Philip Kilonzo, head of policy, advocacy and communications at the Pan African Climate Justice Alliance.
But change is on the horizon.
“Before us is the opportunity to reimagine a future where Africa stewards its landscapes and shapes its own path,” said CIFOR-ICRAF CEO Éliane Ubalijoro at the event’s opening.
And the continent isn’t starting from scratch: Africa is teeming with natural capital, knowledge, wisdom and an inspiring youthful population.
“With this, we can define and build a nature economy that is nature-positive, socially equitable, inclusive and economically competitive,” Ubalijoro continued.
But this does require the right resources in the right places – meaning moving from aid to investment-centered development.
To attract meaningful capital, Africa must move beyond the language of need and start showing up with investable opportunities, said Bogonko.
“This is not a charity case,” she continued. “This is a compelling investment case that the world cannot afford to ignore.”
Solange Bandiaky-Badj, coordinator and president of the Rights and Resources Initiative, echoed this sentiment: “We don’t need development aid anymore. We have the resources that we have. We need to have a prosperous Africa.”
To make this shift, the continent will require innovative new financial instruments and blended finance – a mix of public and private funds.
“We know that private capital doesn’t like risk, and they want predictable returns,” said Robert Nasi, COO of CIFOR-ICRAF.
“On the other side, we know that natural conservation involves uncertainty, [long] timelines and complex outcomes. How you bridge between these realities is by using blended finance”.
And any blended finance must include the communities being invested in.
“Communities should not be seen as just recipients,” said Lilian Macharia, Africa capital hub director at the Investment Bank for Earth.
“We blend our financing structures such that we are layering government funding with donor financing and private capital but also community contributions.”
This same approach should be extended to knowledge.
“I usually tell people that we have more to learn from the community than to teach,” said Joshua Laizer, co-founder of the Tanzania Conservation and Community Empowerment Initiative and GLFx Maasai Steppe.
That should come as no surprise when you consider that these communities deal with their native landscapes daily.
“There’s this global narrative that always paints the picture that local people from rural areas are not educated about ecosystems,” said Steve Misati, director of Youth Pawa. “[But] they interact with the ecosystem every single day from when they were born.”
It’s only by combining multiple forms of knowledge, including Indigenous knowledge and robust science, that we can shorten the gap between knowledge and action, said Ubalijoro.
This knowledge can form the backbone of a new African nature economy – if it’s well integrated.
When those knowledge systems clash, on the other hand, it can lead to missed opportunities and poor policy, putting livelihoods at risk.
“This can deliver unjust and unsustainable resource management, ineffective restoration efforts and unjust benefit sharing schemes,” said Mawa Karambiri, policy and technical engagement specialist for the Sahel at CIFOR-ICRAF
“Then co-creation becomes a matter of social justice and necessary to advance and address complex environmental and human challenges.”
That also means prioritizing African innovation, said Jane Njeri Mwangi, regional partnerships strategist and resource mobilization officer at the International Land Coalition (ILC).
“Our traditional leaders – the traditional knowledge and the traditional systems that already exist – are an opportunity to propel development in our region,” she said.
So, how do we tap into Africa’s well of knowledge? That’s where AI and big data come in.
“Data and AI play a pivotal role in unlocking some of those insights that we’ve never had access to before, bringing a level of transparency that can restore trust in our ecosystem,” said Kate Kallot, founder and CEO at Amini AI.
However, Kallot pointed out that only 2 percent of Africans’ data gets processed on the African continent, posing a significant challenge for localized solutions.
While AI can provide local communities and farmers with actionable insights, these tools must be co-created with the end users.
Sheila Komen Keino, executive director of Sustain Africa at International Fertilizer Development Center, noted that many tech startups fail because they don’t match what farmers actually need.
“People are building illusions and castles in the cloud and imagining that we, the farmers, are going to use those technologies,” she said.
“By the time they come to us, it just doesn’t match with what we need.”
Instead, technology needs to “include the farmer not just as the end user but a co-creator in our solutions,” said Esther Maina, a geospatial developer at the Kenya Space Agency.
This involves understanding and catering to farmers’ needs. For instance, chatbots should be designed to speak local languages and provide alerts and other key information via text messages – eliminating the need for smartphones.
Innovative AI models can also be used to shape user needs, said Chido Dzinotyiwei, co-founder and CEO of Vambo AI.
An AI model can be trained to “conduct itself like a Kenyan farmer, like a South African farmer, like a farmer who has limited proficiency in English or a limited level of education,” ensuring the technology meets them where they are, she explained.
Africa holds two-thirds of the world’s arable land. If this land is to be kept healthy for future generations, farmers have to be the ones to do it.
Farmer-managed natural regeneration (FMNR) is a simple, cost-effective and community-driven land restoration approach that was highlighted at GLF Africa 2025.
Under FMNR, farmers manage and promote the growth of naturally occurring trees and shrubs rather than planting new ones.
“The technology leverages nature’s own regenerative power, or the ability for the environment to heal itself,” said Humphrey Wafula, a project manager at World Vision Kenya.
“I’’s a simple yet profoundly impactful solution for ecological recovery.”
When done well, it can improve agricultural productivity, increase biodiversity and combat poverty and hunger.
It is also a prime example of how to leverage existing knowledge.
“Farmer-managed natural regeneration is not really a new concept. It’s some technology that is borrowing from the traditions and the wisdom of our communities,” said Wafula.
Kiruki Haron, a senior lecturer at Southeastern Kenya University, described FMNR as “an Indigenous technology that has always been there.”
One major barrier to any regeneration, however, is land rights: it’s hard for farmers to restore land that they don’t own or control.
Much of Africa’s land is governed by a convoluted system of tenure systems that combine customary and statutory ownership, shaped by colonial and commercial influences. These systems often contradict each other.
“We have seen a lot of conflict, a lot of displacement, and of course, it’s also as a result of conflicting legal frameworks,” said Mwangi.
And it’s often marginalized groups, such as women, Indigenous Peoples and youth, that bear the brunt of this conflict.
“Land ownership is governed by cultural norms that discriminate [against] some parts of society – like the patriarchy that gives power to men over women,” said Freddy Bisettsa, co-founder and director of Women Concern and coordinator of GLFx Kivu.
“This is one of the obstacles that I can identify around the fight for land rights, and this also hinders the community’s efforts in land restoration.”
The same is true of Africa’s natural resources.
More than half of Africa’s critical mineral projects are located either near or on Indigenous and community land, said Bandiaky-Badji.
And yet the rights to those resources have been given away to global corporations, according to Kilonzo.
“Most of the countries that are producing these critical minerals have no stake in them,” he rued.
At GLF Africa 2025, it was clear that the continent’s top thinkers are forging new models for development.
“What if development in Africa was no longer about extracting from nature, but regenerating it?” asked Dorothy Maseke, nature finance lead at FSD Africa and head of the African Natural Capital Alliance Secretariat.
“What if our forests, our grasslands, our mangroves and traditional knowledge – once seen as relics – [were seen as] drivers of innovation, drivers of resilience and drivers of prosperity?”
This means moving away from outdated ideas of extraction and reliance on foreign aid – and instead leveraging Africa’s vast natural capital, led by its communities and supported by appropriate technology, innovation and investment.
“It is time for Africa to rise up to the challenge and steward its development,” said Ubalijoro.
“We have the resources, we have the will, and we can build healthy ecosystems, resilient and prosperous livelihoods and competitive and sustainable economies.
“It is time to innovate, restore and prosper once again.”
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