Africa and the United States: A Relationship Built More on Neglect Than on Strategy

 

In December 2022, President Joe Biden hosted the first US-Africa Leaders Summit in eight years, gathering representatives of forty-nine African governments in Washington to announce partnerships totalling forty-nine billion dollars in commitments over three years.^[1] The summit generated positive coverage, a flurry of bilateral meetings, and a joint statement dense with strategic language. It also took place at a moment when the United States was acutely aware that China had hosted its own Forum on China-Africa Cooperation summits every three years without interruption since 2000, that Russia had deepened military relationships across the Sahel, and that several African governments had declined to condemn the invasion of Ukraine in the UN General Assembly votes of 2022.

The Biden summit, in other words, was less a product of strategic clarity about Africa than a reaction to the perception that America was losing ground. That reactive quality is the defining feature of US-Africa relations across administrations. Washington engages with the continent in bursts of activity, typically triggered by a specific concern, whether security, resource competition, or geopolitical rivalry, and then lapses into extended periods of disengagement in which Africa falls below the threshold of consistent senior attention.

The Trump administration’s return to the White House in January 2025 has sharpened this pattern considerably. Aid programmes have been cut, diplomatic postings left unfilled, and the strategic framing of Africa in official Washington has narrowed almost entirely to the question of how to counter Chinese and Russian influence rather than any positive vision for what the relationship should achieve.^[2] African governments and analysts, watching this from Nairobi, Lagos, and Pretoria, have largely drawn the same conclusion: the United States is a partner that must be managed rather than relied upon, engaged when useful and treated with appropriate skepticism the rest of the time.

The Structural Patterns of US Engagement with Africa

Understanding the current state of US-Africa relations requires appreciating three structural patterns that have persisted across Republican and Democratic administrations over several decades, shaping the relationship in ways that individual policies and presidential statements have rarely managed to overcome.

The first is the security-first framing. From the creation of AFRICOM in 2008 to the Sahel counterterrorism partnerships of the 2010s to the current preoccupation with Chinese military basing in the continent, the US government has consistently organised its Africa engagement around security concerns rather than development, trade, or political partnership.^[3] AFRICOM’s annual budget is larger than the combined budget of the State Department’s Africa Bureau and USAID’s Africa programmes. The consequence is that the US presents itself to African governments primarily as a security actor, with all the transactional dynamics that implies, rather than as a partner in the broader development and governance challenges that African populations actually identify as their priority concerns.

The second structural pattern is the aid-and-democracy-promotion frame, which has dominated the civilian side of the relationship since the end of the Cold War. PEPFAR, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief launched in 2003, is genuinely one of the most consequential American contributions to human welfare anywhere in the world, credited with saving more than twenty-five million lives across sub-Saharan Africa.^[4] The Millennium Challenge Corporation has financed infrastructure projects with genuine development impact. But these programmes operate within a frame that positions the United States as a benefactor and African governments as recipients. That frame has real consequences for the political dynamics of the relationship: it makes genuine partnership difficult, creates dependency that is resented even when the transfers are appreciated, and provides limited basis for the kind of commercial and strategic engagement that both sides would benefit from.

The third pattern is what analysts at the Council on Foreign Relations and Brookings have called the “Africa surge” phenomenon: the periodic mobilisation of high-level US attention to Africa, typically in the form of a summit, a presidential visit, or a major initiative, followed by an extended period of institutional inattention as the administration’s priorities shift elsewhere.^[5] The pattern produces real harm. African governments that invest political capital in a relationship with Washington find the bandwidth on the other side inconsistent. American businesses that might invest in Africa cannot rely on a sustained diplomatic infrastructure to support them. And the continent’s populations, who might benefit from a genuinely consistent American partnership, receive instead an episodic attention whose intensity correlates more closely with US domestic political cycles than with African needs.

8 years

Gap between the 2014 and 2022 US-Africa Leaders Summits Obama hosted the first in 2014; Biden hosted the second in December 2022, explicitly responding to China’s FOCAC consistency

 

25m+	Lives saved by PEPFAR across sub-Saharan Africa since 2003 PEPFAR 20th Anniversary Report, 2023 — the most consequential US contribution to African welfare

 

$55bn

US trade with sub-Saharan Africa in 2023, versus China’s $282bn USTR / IMF DOTS 2024 — illustrating the commercial engagement gap that strategic rhetoric has not closed

AGOA, Trade, and the Commercial Relationship That Never Fulfilled Its Potential

The African Growth and Opportunity Act, first enacted in 2000 and periodically renewed, is the centrepiece of the US-Africa trade relationship. It provides eligible sub-Saharan African countries with duty-free access to the US market for thousands of product categories, on the theory that expanded trade access would stimulate manufacturing, employment, and economic diversification across the continent.^[6]

The results have been real but narrowly concentrated. AGOA has generated genuine export growth in sectors including apparel manufacturing in Ethiopia and Lesotho, automotive components in South Africa, and agricultural products from several East African countries. But the programme’s benefits have accrued disproportionately to a small number of countries with the pre-existing industrial capacity to exploit market access, while the majority of AGOA-eligible countries have seen minimal gains. Total US imports from sub-Saharan Africa under AGOA have actually declined from their peak in the early 2010s, as oil and other commodity exports that previously dominated the figures have fallen.

AGOA’s structural limitation is that market access alone cannot substitute for the complementary investments in infrastructure, logistics, energy, and skills that would allow African manufacturers to compete in US markets at scale. The Prosper Africa initiative, launched in 2019 under the Trump administration and continued under Biden, was designed to address this by mobilising private investment rather than relying primarily on aid and market access.^[6] Its concrete impact has been modest relative to its ambitions. The comparison with China’s infrastructure financing is instructive not because Chinese lending is without problems, as the debt analysis in Day 18 made clear, but because it illustrates how much more than market access is required to build a commercial relationship of strategic depth.

AGOA’s renewal is due before 2025 expires. The Trump administration has given no firm commitment to renewal, and several African governments have been quietly preparing for the possibility that the programme lapses.^[6] The political dynamics in Washington that make a consistent Africa trade policy difficult are not unique to any administration: Africa simply does not have the domestic political constituency in the United States that Latin America or Asia commands, and the institutional champions for a robust US-Africa trade relationship have never been numerous enough to sustain it through the inevitable shifts in congressional and executive priority.

“The United States is a partner Africa must manage, not rely upon. That is not an accusation. It is an honest description of what the relationship has been, across administrations, for thirty years. Clarity on that point is the beginning of a more realistic and more productive engagement.” Africa & Global Power — Day 23 Editorial Position

The Trump Factor: What the Second Administration Means for Africa

The return of the Trump administration in January 2025 has produced changes in the US-Africa relationship that go beyond the predictable shift in rhetorical emphasis. The administration’s decision to freeze and then substantially cut USAID funding, implemented through executive order in the first weeks of the administration, has had immediate and in some cases catastrophic consequences for humanitarian programmes across the continent.^[2] Food assistance programmes in Sudan, Ethiopia, and the DRC have been disrupted. HIV treatment supply chains dependent on PEPFAR funding have faced uncertainty. Health system support programmes in more than a dozen countries have been suspended pending review.

The strategic framing of Africa in the current administration is, to the extent it exists, almost entirely organised around the China competition lens. The Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment, the Biden administration’s infrastructure alternative to China’s Belt and Road Initiative, has been deprioritised. The Lobito Corridor project in southern Africa, a rare example of concrete US infrastructure investment in the continent, has retained some momentum, but its future funding profile is uncertain.^[7]

African governments have responded to these shifts with a pragmatism that reflects long experience of managing Washington’s unreliability. None of the major African economies has formally repositioned away from the United States. Several have quietly diversified their partnerships further, deepening engagement with the EU, Gulf states, India, and Turkey as alternatives to a US relationship whose consistency cannot be assumed. The Kenyan government’s negotiations with the IMF and its concurrent engagement with the Gulf Cooperation Council on budget support reflect exactly this kind of hedging.

What a More Serious US-Africa Relationship Would Require

The fundamental problem in US-Africa relations is not a shortage of goodwill, partnership frameworks, or strategic language. It is a structural mismatch between the scale of American interest in the relationship and the institutional investment required to sustain it. Several things would need to change for the relationship to move onto a genuinely different footing.

First, AGOA must be renewed and reformed. A successor framework that addresses the programme’s structural limitations, by pairing market access with complementary investment in manufacturing capacity, logistics infrastructure, and skills development, would be considerably more valuable than a simple extension of the existing architecture.^[8] African governments have been making this argument for years. Whether the current US political environment is capable of producing it is a different question.

Second, the security-first framing of the AFRICOM model must be rebalanced. A US-Africa relationship organised primarily around counterterrorism partnerships and Chinese base-denial will continue to produce the transactional dynamic that has characterised it for two decades. A rebalancing toward commercial partnership, technology transfer, and governance support would require both a reallocation of resources and a genuine change in how the Africa relationship is conceptualised at the senior levels of the US government.^[3]

Third, and most fundamentally, the United States needs a consistent institutional home for Africa policy at a level of seniority and resource that matches the continent’s actual strategic importance. The current arrangement, in which Africa policy is managed through a State Department bureau that is chronically understaffed relative to its portfolio, produces the episodic attention and policy discontinuity that African governments have come to expect.^[9] Several analysts, including those at the Africa Center for Strategic Studies, have argued for an elevation of the US-Africa relationship to the National Security Council level as a standing priority rather than a crisis-response trigger. That argument remains unheeded in Washington. It should not be.

Verdict: Africa Does Not Need American Attention. It Needs American Consistency.

The United States remains, despite everything, a partner that African governments want to work with. American universities train African professionals. American capital markets finance African companies. American technology firms have reshaped African digital economies. And American diplomatic weight, when deployed consistently, can shift outcomes on debt restructuring, security crises, and global governance reform in ways that other partners cannot match.

But the gap between what the relationship could be and what it has been is enormous, and the responsibility for that gap sits primarily in Washington. Africa has not been neglected because it lacks strategic importance. It has been neglected because Washington’s political economy consistently deprioritises relationships that lack a powerful domestic constituency, and because the security-first, aid-based frame through which Africa has been conceptualised for three decades has proved inadequate to the scale of the relationship either side actually needs.^[10]

Changing that requires something more durable than a summit, a pledge figure, or an initiative named with an acronym. It requires institutional investment, consistent senior attention, and a genuine willingness to engage Africa as a partner with its own interests and leverage, rather than as a theatre for competition with China. The Africa that exists in 2026 is not the Africa of 2000. Whether Washington’s Africa policy reflects that is a different question entirely.