By Beatrice Makwenda, TrustAfrica
As leaders, civil society, young people, farmers, policy actors and development partners gathered in Durban around the 46th SADC Summit, one question kept resurfacing across very different conversations: how do we move from regional ambition to transformation that people can actually experience?
Southern Africa is not short of ambition. The region has significant agricultural potential, strategic minerals, a young population, growing markets and a long history of regional cooperation. It also has frameworks covering industrialisation, agriculture, infrastructure, climate resilience and regional integration.
Yet the contradictions remain difficult to ignore.
Millions of people continue to experience acute food insecurity. Governments are operating within increasingly constrained fiscal environments. Climate shocks repeatedly erase development gains. Young people are demanding greater influence over economic choices that will define their futures. And as global interest in Africa’s critical minerals accelerates, an old question has returned in a new form: will Africa simply supply the resources that power somebody else’s transformation, or will it shape and benefit from its own?
These were not abstract questions in Durban.
TrustAfrica’s participation around the SADC Summit took us into conversations on food systems transformation, youth agency, economic justice, civic participation and the SADC People’s Summit. Across these spaces, what emerged was a common thread: Southern Africa’s transformation will depend not only on the policies it adopts or the capital it attracts, but on the agency of African institutions, communities and citizens to shape how that transformation happens.
El Niño reminds us that resilience cannot wait
Nowhere is the urgency clearer than in our food systems.
Southern Africa is still carrying the consequences of successive climate and economic shocks. The March 2026 regional food-security assessment found more than 38.8 million people across eight SADC countries facing Crisis-level acute food insecurity or worse during the assessment period.
And another climate warning is before us.
The prospect of a strengthening El Niño should therefore not be treated simply as a meteorological story. It is a test of whether we have learned from previous crises.
Too often, resources become available after crops have failed, livestock have been lost, food prices have risen and households have exhausted their coping mechanisms. By then, resilience has already become humanitarian response.
We need to reverse that logic.
The time to finance resilience is before the emergency.
That means investing now in soil and water systems, locally appropriate seed systems, storage, climate information, extension, anticipatory financing, social protection and livelihood buffers. It also means recognising that farmers are not merely beneficiaries of resilience programmes. They are investors, knowledge holders and economic actors who should have a meaningful role in determining agricultural priorities.
This is why the food-systems conversation cannot end with increasing production. Regional agricultural transformation must connect farmers and small businesses to agro-processing, infrastructure, markets and regional trade so that agriculture generates livelihoods, jobs and value within the region. The reflection note consequently calls for shifting resources towards anticipatory action and linking agrifood transformation to an industrial agenda.
The deeper question is who shapes transformation
The same political-economy question extends beyond agriculture.
Southern Africa sits at the centre of growing international competition for minerals required for the global energy transition. That creates an extraordinary economic opportunity—but opportunity does not automatically translate into transformation.
The critical question is where value is retained.
If minerals continue to leave the continent with limited processing, weak local linkages and insufficient benefits for affected communities, Africa risks participating in the green transition without fundamentally changing its position in global value chains.
A just industrialisation agenda must therefore place beneficiation, regional value chains, public value, environmental safeguards and community rights at its centre.
The same applies to financing.
Southern African countries need investment, but the conversation cannot only be about attracting more money. It must also be about the terms on which capital enters, the value that leaves, the fiscal space governments retain and the capacity of public institutions to finance development priorities.
And it applies equally to democracy.
Our engagement with young people and civic actors around the SADC People’s Summit reinforced something important: participation cannot mean simply inviting young people into rooms after the important decisions have already been framed.
Young Africans must increasingly be recognised as policy actors, agenda setters and partners in implementation and accountability. The policy reflection therefore calls for durable mechanisms through which youth, farmer organisations, women, civic actors and knowledge institutions can shape implementation and monitor delivery.
From a Summit moment to a regional agenda
This is perhaps the most important reflection coming out of Durban.
The conversations cannot remain in Durban.
They must travel into national budgets and investment plans; regional financing mechanisms; agricultural programmes; mineral policies; research agendas; philanthropic strategies; private investment decisions; and mechanisms through which citizens hold institutions accountable.
For African philanthropy, there is also a particular responsibility.
Philanthropic capital will never substitute for public finance or the scale of investment required to transform African economies. But it can do something other forms of capital often struggle to do: provide flexible and patient resources to African institutions, movements, research organisations and coalitions; support experimentation; connect community knowledge to policymaking; and sustain civic spaces in which difficult questions about power, ownership and accountability can be asked.
As TrustAfrica marks 20 years of shaping the future, this matters deeply to us.
Twenty years of African-led work have reinforced a simple lesson: transformation is not produced by resources alone. It depends on the institutions, knowledge, relationships and civic power that enable Africans to determine how resources are governed and how development choices are made.
Perhaps, then, the most important resource Southern Africa possesses is not beneath its soil.
It is its agency.
The agency to anticipate shocks rather than perpetually respond to them. To transform agricultural production into resilient food systems. To turn mineral wealth into public and regional value. To give young people influence rather than symbolic representation. To finance African institutions capable of thinking and acting for the long term.
And ultimately, the agency to ensure that when we speak of regional transformation, Africans are not simply the beneficiaries of a future designed elsewhere—they are the people shaping it.
