Africa does not lack water projects. It has projects, visions, policies and frameworks going back decades. What it has lacked is agreement on why they stall – and a place to do something about it together. In 2026 that changed. For the first time, the continent's water sector is mobilising around a single question: how do we make our institutions credible enough to unlock finance? Water ministers, the African Union Commission and the African Development Bank are converging on the Africa Water & Sanitation Systems Leadership Symposium 2026 in Kigali this August, organised around a shared framework for how that credibility gets built. The framework began as a proposition we put on the table and is now the backbone of an agenda carried out by the continent's own institutions.
THE BIGGER PICTURE
For years the instinct was to ask financiers for more. But development banks step back when they cannot see institutions able to turn money into working services. The African Union's own investment panel suggested an alternative: most of what the continent needs can be raised in Africa – through stronger tax effort, responsible tariffs and disciplined public finance – as long as the institutions handling it are trusted. That moves the question from "how do we find more money?" to "how do we make our systems worth investing in?" It makes water and sanitation a test of how a state governs itself, rather than a sector appeal.
HOW WE WORKED
No single partner could have done this alone. We brought the argument – years of making the case that institutional credibility is the hinge of change, distilled into a framework and a design for a gathering that could turn it into a continental agenda. AMCOW and the African Union brought what we never could: the political mandate to convene Africa's water ministers and hold them to a shared table, with the Government of Rwanda hosting. We did not convene this, and were careful not to. It was critical that the institutions with the mandate carry the stage.
THE HUMAN STORY
The alliance needed someone inside AMCOW willing to carry it, and that was Nelson Gomonda. Long before he stepped up to lead the AMCOW Secretariat, he took the symposium into the council and made it the Secretariat's own. He argued it was worth the Union’s political capital – worth taking to the African Union Commission, the African Development Bank and water ministers across the continent, and worth asking them to arrive in Kigali as co-authors of a reform agenda. Once he was behind it, the African Union's Year of Water started generating national implementation frameworks that ministers are asked to bring, own and account for.
WHAT CHANGED
A year ago the Symposium was an idea. It is now a fixed point on the continent's calendar, hosted by Rwanda, convened by the African Union and AMCOW, a thousand leaders expected, with the African Development Bank, regulators and utilities shaping the content. The deeper shift is underneath the logistics: finance ministries and financiers are involved from the start, and the conversation has moved from projects to the credibility of whole systems. The Symposium will be the point where Africa's priorities enter the global stage, a bridge from Dakar to the United Nations Water Conference in December.
The alliance needed someone inside AMCOW willing to carry it, and that was Nelson Gomonda. Long before he stepped up to lead the AMCOW Secretariat, he took the symposium into the council and made it the Secretariat's own. He argued it was worth the Union’s political capital – worth taking to the African Union Commission, the African Development Bank and water ministers across the continent, and worth asking them to arrive in Kigali as co-authors of a reform agenda. Once he was behind it, the African Union's Year of Water started generating national implementation frameworks that ministers are asked to bring, own and account for.
WHAT CHANGED
A year ago the Symposium was an idea. It is now a fixed point on the continent's calendar, hosted by Rwanda, convened by the African Union and AMCOW, a thousand leaders expected, with the African Development Bank, regulators and utilities shaping the content. The deeper shift is underneath the logistics: finance ministries and financiers are involved from the start, and the conversation has moved from projects to the credibility of whole systems. The Symposium will be the point where Africa's priorities enter the global stage, a bridge from Dakar to the United Nations Water Conference in December.
WHAT’S NEXT
The Symposium is expected to launch a declaration making institutional credibility the continent's shared benchmark for reform and investment, and to seed the follow-up mechanisms – for finance, regulation, professionalisation – that keep commitments from evaporating. AMCOW will weigh the results at its Executive Committee in October, the African Union in its end-of-year report. Whether it holds will be judged in the national plans and financing decisions that follow.
If institutional credibility is a barrier to the finance your country needs, let’s talk.