Livingstone, Zambia — 23-25 September 2026
For the first time, three of Africa’s leading professional confederations – TICON Africa (Technology Information Confederation Africa), the African Marketing Confederation (AMC), and the African Supply Chain Confederation (ASCON) — met under one conference roof. The landmark gathering, the African Commerce Convergence Summit (ACCS), was held from 23-25 September 2026 at the Avani Victoria Falls Resort in Livingstone, Zambia.
Hosted locally by ICTAZ, ZIM, and ZIPS, the summit brought together ministers, regulators, and industry leaders from across the continent under the theme: “Africa Rising: From Continental Strengths to Global Impact.” The ACCS focuses on integrated growth, cross-border innovation, and long-term sustainability across Africa’s marketing, ICT, and supply chain sectors. For TICON Africa, which has represented the continent’s ICT professionals since 2022, the convergence carries a clear message to policymakers and regulators: technology policy can no longer be written in isolation from trade and marketing policy — not if Africa intends to compete as one market.
The African Continental Free Trade Area gave Africa the legal right to trade as a single market of 1.4 billion people. It did not, on its own, make that market operate at the speed regulators and businesses now need. Goods still move slowly across borders. Digital systems still stop at national lines. Payment platforms still route through third currencies before two African traders can settle a transaction. Closing that gap requires coordinated policy across three disciplines that, until now, have rarely shared a regulatory conversation: technology, marketing, and supply chain.
Technology sits underneath the other two, which is why TICON Africa places it at the centre of its case to policymakers. Sub-Saharan Africa moved close to 1.4 trillion dollars through mobile money in 2025, roughly two-thirds of the world’s total mobile money value, according to GSMA. That scale exists because national regulators built the licensing and interoperability rules that allowed it. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, now connecting more than a hundred banks, is projected to cut foreign exchange costs on intra-African trade by 20 to 30 percent, but only where central banks and telecom regulators align their rules with each other. Digital customs platforms and shared traceability standards can cut the border friction that consumes up to a third of export value in landlocked markets, but only where customs authorities agree on common data standards first.
None of this is a technology problem alone. A marketing regulator setting rules for cross-border advertising and consumer data needs the same digital identity and data-protection standards a technology regulator is building. A trade ministry negotiating supply chain corridors needs the payment interoperability a telecom regulator licenses. TICON Africa’s argument at Livingstone is that these three regulatory conversations should be one conversation, not three.
This is the policy case TICON Africa is putting before delegates and government officials: standards, certification, and regulatory alignment are not back-office details. They are the difference between a digital economy that scales across fifty-four borders and one that stays locked inside each of them. It is also the confederation’s founding mandate. TICON Africa states plainly that its purpose is to standardize professional qualifications, research, publications, events, and regulation reforms across its member countries, and to help countries without an ICT professional association establish one.
TICON Africa was established to build exactly that regulatory backbone for the ICT profession. The confederation was founded on 20 October 2022, when ICT associations from five African countries, Ghana, South Africa, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, met at the Elephant Hills Hotel in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe, to discuss the state of the ICT profession across the continent. David Gowu and Kafui Amanfu, representing Ghana’s Institute of ICT Professionals (IIPGH), became the confederation’s first elected President and Vice-President, West Africa, respectively.
Four years on, TICON Africa’s primary membership has grown from those five founding associations to bodies representing twenty-one African countries, stretching from Cape Verde and Nigeria in the west to Ethiopia and South Sudan in the east, and from Rwanda and Tanzania down to Eswatini and South Africa in the south. The confederation has convened an annual conference every year since its founding: the inaugural gathering in Entebbe, Uganda, in 2023; Mombasa, Kenya, in 2024; a joint conference with AMC in Accra, Ghana, in 2025; and now the three-confederation gathering in Livingstone.
That growth has been organized rather than accidental, run through five standing committees and a dedicated chapter for women in the profession. The Education Committee develops and quality-assures professional courses recognized across member countries. The Events Committee runs the annual conference and a calendar of continuing professional development, including regular masterclasses open to members between conferences. The Publications Committee sets editorial policy for the confederation’s journals, research output, and its magazine, Africa’s Tech Pulse, launched in 2025. The Research Committee sets TICON Africa’s research priorities and coordinates studies relevant to ICT policy across the continent, feeding into a growing library of research initiatives on the confederation’s website. The latest addition is the Compliance Committee, championing standards and regulatory practices, aimed at strengthening responsible ICT governance, cybersecurity, data governance, artificial intelligence assurance, professional competence and public accountability across Africa.
Alongside the five committees, the Women in TICON Chapter, launched at our 2024 Mombasa conference, works to equip and connect women across the ICT profession and open pathways to leadership and funding. This is increasingly an expectation regulators have of any professional body seeking a voice in policy. In 2025, we also introduced the Pan-African Certification Framework, which ensures an ICT professional’s qualification carries the same recognition across borders as it does at home — the very type of cross-border standard regulators need to make continental trade in services under AfCFTA work in practice, not just on paper.
For ministries of communication, technology, and trade, the policy implication is direct. A confederation that already certifies professionals, sets research priorities, and coordinates standards across twenty-one countries is not simply a conference organizer. It is regulatory infrastructure that already exists. Recognizing TICON Africa’s certification framework within public procurement and national skills systems and inviting its committees into the drafting of digital trade and data policy, would let governments plug into an apparatus already built, rather than construct one from scratch in every country.
That is the case TICON Africa is making, alongside AMC and ASCON: that Africa’s competitiveness depends on technology, marketing, and supply chain regulation moving together, the way tributaries feed a single river before that river becomes powerful enough to matter. Ghana’s own Volta River makes the same point at home, gathering water from Burkina Faso, Togo, Benin, Côte d’Ivoire, and Mali before it becomes the force behind the Akosombo Dam. Zambia’s Zambezi does the same before it becomes Victoria Falls. Neither river was powerful as a single stream. Neither confederation, working alone, can deliver the regulatory coherence Africa’s digital economy now needs.
TICON Africa invites governments, regulators, and industry bodies across the continent to collaborate. Any stakeholder—whether a regulator seeking adoption of a shared standard, a ministry seeking continental representation for its national ICT association, or a company wanting its market reflected in Pan-African policy research—can channel its input through its country’s member association to the relevant committee at any time and use that to shape national policy conversations.
R. Kafui Amanfu
Executive Director, Institute of ICT Professionals Ghana (IIPGH) | Vice-President, West, TICON Africa
richard.amanfu@iipgh.org
www.iipgh.org | www.ticonafrica.org