The Alliance Française de Nairobi opened its doors on May 7 to launch the Africa Forward Fest, a three-day pan-African literary festival that marks the cultural opening act of one of the continent’s most significant diplomatic gatherings in recent memory.
The inaugural festival edition, reimagined from the Alliance Française’s long-running annual literary event and rebranded under its new pan-African identity, began with a focus on children and young voices. The morning session featured the launch of the 2026 Digital Essay Competition’s French category, Let Me Speak, which invited learners to share personal stories and experiences through writing, accompanied by live storytelling and illustration from artists from Benin and the Democratic Republic of Congo.
The evening culminated in the exclusive Prix de l’Édition Jeunesse Africaine (PEJA) awards ceremony, recognising outstanding achievement in Francophone African children’s publishing.
The prize, organised by Maua Books in collaboration with the Alliance Française deNairobi, drew entries from 25 publishers across 12 African countries and was judged by a pan-African jury of 20 professionals from 13 nations. Its shortlist had been unveiled at the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in April.
“Children’s publishing is not only about early reading,” noted the festival organisers. “It is a strategic foundation for the entire literary ecosystem, shaping future readers, reading practices and sustainable book markets across Africa.”
The festival’s opening day also included a conversation around Eghosa Imasuen’s novel The Challengers, exploring business growth and innovation in the African context, as well as a session on migration literature featuring Tunisian author Walid Amri, whose poetic novel Les Papillons de Lampedusa traces the human realities of displacement and borders, in conversation with Kenyan literary figure John Sibi-Okumu.
The Africa Forward Fest, which runs from 7th to 9th May at the Alliance Française de Nairobi, serves as a cultural curtain-raiser to the Africa Forward Summit, the landmark diplomatic event co-hosted by Kenya and France scheduled for 11th and 12th May at the Kenyatta International Convention Centre and the University of Nairobi.
The summit, jointly convened by President William Ruto and French President Emmanuel Macron, is described by organisers as a milestone in France-Africa relations, nearly a decade after Macron’s landmark Ouagadougou speech that sought to reframe the relationship. It is also the first such summit to be co-hosted with an English-speaking African country, signalling a shift toward a more continental, less linguistically siloed approach to partnership.
READ ABOUT THE THREE EVENTS THAT FORM PART OF AFRICA FORWARD
The summit is expected to convene over 30 Heads of State and Government, some 4,000 delegates and around 2,000 private companies and their chief executives, positioning Nairobi as a major diplomatic, investment and media hub. Its agenda spans seven strategic areas: reform of the international financial architecture, peace & security, green industrialisation & energy transition, the blue economy, sustainable agriculture, artificial intelligence & digital technologies and global health. It is set to conclude with a Nairobi Declaration and concrete investment commitments.
Certain outcomes of the summit are also expected to feed directly into France’s G7 presidency, with the Evian summit scheduled for June.
The Africa Forward Fest was conceived as more than a warm-up act. Led by the Alliance Française de Nairobi in partnership with digital publishing platform eKitabu, the festival carries its own substantive ambition: to strengthen connections between Francophone and Anglophone African literary ecosystems and to support the full book value chain from creation and translation through to publication and readership.
Over its three days, the programme traverses themes that map directly onto the broader summit’s concerns, from the power of language and who controls it, to questions of access, equity and the circulation of African stories within and beyond the continent.
Friday’s sessions tackle the role of AI in authorship, the politics of literary translation, and the challenge of global publishing access for African writers. Saturday closes with a translation masterclass, a publisher pitch competition for emerging authors and an evening stage adaptation of David G. Maillu’s novel, After 4.30, directed by Mwaniki Njache.
Running throughout all three days, six artists, including Nairobi muralists Chela Chelwek and Blaine 29, alongside illustrators from Benin and the DRC, are painting a live Africa Forward Mural on the perimeter walls of the Alliance Française, an initiative of the Innovation Foundation for Democracy that celebrates the power of language and young Africans’ reimagining of political and social possibility.
The festival is supported by the French government, the Agence Française de Développement, the Institut Français and the Fondation de l’Innovation pour la Démocratie.
