The African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA) Confrence 2025
The African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA) will host its annual 2025 AVPA Conference from November 3 to 5, 2025, at the Trademark Hotel in Nairobi, Kenya.
This year’s theme, “Future-Proofing Africa: Driving Sustainable Investments and Innovations for Resilient Growth,” responds to the growing urgency across the continent to rethink how financial and non-financial capital is mobilized and deployed to build long-term resilience and self-reliance.
The event comes at a critical moment for Africa.
As foreign aid flows decline and traditional funding mechanisms face increasing pressure, stakeholders across the development, business, and investment landscape are being called upon to build new, sustainable models of financing that can scale social impact and unlock inclusive growth.
AVPA is convening a diverse set of actors from impact investors and philanthropists to social entrepreneurs, policymakers, and development leaders to jointly explore how Africa can position itself for future resilience.
Rethinking Social Investment in a Changing Landscape
Africa faces a complex mix of challenges and opportunities.
Climate change, economic inequality, and restricted access to capital continue to threaten inclusive growth across the continent.
At the same time, there are strong tailwinds: rapid technological advances, innovative finance models, a growing middle class, and an increasingly entrepreneurial population.
These trends offer the potential to redefine Africa’s development trajectory.
This year’s conference is framed around the understanding that future-proofing Africa requires more than stopgap aid or short-term philanthropy.
It calls for long-term strategies rooted in collaborative, scalable, and locally driven investment models that are responsive to Africa’s realities and anchored in partnerships that prioritize resilience over dependency.
The donor landscape, once a major source of funding for social initiatives across Africa, is undergoing unprecedented shifts.
Aid cuts are becoming more frequent, creating resource gaps for projects that previously relied on external funding.
The 2025 AVPA Conference seeks to provide a platform to examine alternative funding pathways, including how to better mobilize domestic resources, leverage catalytic capital, and integrate non-financial support for system-level transformation.
Key Objectives of the 2025 Conference
AVPA has outlined several core objectives for this year’s convening:
- Explore strategies for mobilizing domestic private capital, including dormant assets and catalytic investment,s to build sustainable alternatives to donor-dependent funding.
- Convene stakeholders across the continuum of capital to co-create practical, scalable solutions that address Africa’s most pressing challenges.
- Showcase African-led innovations that combine finance, technology, and entrepreneurship to achieve measurable impact at scale.
- Secure investment and policy commitments from both public and private sectors to strengthen Africa’s social investment ecosystem.
The event will also serve as a launchpad for new partnerships, frameworks, and tools aimed at improving the effectiveness of social investment across the continent.
Target Audience
The conference will bring together a wide-ranging set of participants, including:
- Impact investors, philanthropists, and DFIs
- Corporate leaders and financial institutions
- Social entrepreneurs, startups, and innovation hubs
- Government officials and policy advisors
- Academics, researchers, and thought leaders
This diverse mix of actors is expected to foster cross-sector conversations and collaborations that are essential for building a resilient and inclusive Africa.
Outcomes and Impact
AVPA expects the conference to generate several key outcomes:
- New models of funding and investment that reduce reliance on foreign aid and enable African stakeholders to take ownership of their development trajectories.
- Deeper cross-sector partnerships that can accelerate impact through shared infrastructure, co-financing, and pooled knowledge.
- Increased investment in African-led ventures that demonstrate scalable, tech-enabled, and climate-resilient solutions.
- Concrete policy insights to help governments and regulatory bodies create an enabling environment for impact investing and blended finance.
- Post-conference collaborations that will drive follow-through on the commitments and strategies identified during the convening.
The 2025 AVPA Conference is not just a networking opportunity; it is designed as a working platform to forge action-oriented strategies that will shape Africa’s social investment future.
For more information and to register https://avpaconference.africa/
About the African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA)
The African Venture Philanthropy Alliance (AVPA) is a Pan-African network of social investors committed to increasing the flow of capital into African social investments and ensuring that capital is effectively deployed for long-term impact.
AVPA supports a full continuum of capital, including grants, debt, and equity, and works with actors spanning finance, philanthropy, government, and the broader development ecosystem.
With headquarters in Nairobi and regional offices in Lagos and Johannesburg, AVPA operates as part of a global alliance alongside Impact Europe, Latimpacto (Latin America), and AVPN (Asia), forming a collective platform to drive social impact across geographies.
Through knowledge exchange, capacity building, and partnership facilitation, AVPA aims to address the significant SDG financing gap on the continent and transform the way capital is mobilized and used in Africa.
