Bridging continents, building futures: South-South cooperation for Africa’s next horizon

South-South cooperation can be a powerful force driving Africa’s transformation and Latin America and the Caribbean’s shared progress. But true success depends not on distant agreements; it requires empowering local communities and activating the vibrant link of the African diaspora.

Conversations at this year’s UNGA reinforced what many development practitioners already know: that cooperation agreements between governments are only the starting point. The true test comes when those commitments reach municipalities, provinces, and communities. This is where they succeed or stumble, and where the resilience of development efforts is ultimately forged.

For Africa, partnerships across the Global South, particularly with Latin America and the Caribbean, hold deep promise. Both regions share histories of resilience, diaspora connections, and development challenges that are remarkably parallel. Yet these parallels also show us that replicating models without adapting them to hyperlocal conditions risks missed opportunities.

What we need is cooperation built with foresight; connecting policy ambition with the subnational systems that bring it to life.

Shared lessons in implementation

Latin America’s track record provides us with a valuable library of experience. Mozambique’s ProSAVANA initiative, though it drew on Brazil’s Cerrado expertise, struggled with adaptation to local farming contexts in the Nacala Corridor. In Brazil, the Proinfância childcare programme encountered similar implementation gaps when federal design misjudged municipal capabilities. These outcomes should not discourage engagement; instead, they highlight the importance of aligning design with delivery capacity at the local level.

At the same time, Latin America and the Caribbean offers positive lessons that Africa can build upon. Brazil’s Bolsa Família and Family Health Strategy demonstrate how national commitments can thrive when municipalities are empowered with responsibilities and supported with the right data systems, governance structures, and financial safeguards. These examples underscore that the locus of success lies not at the summit table but at the municipal office, the community health centre, and the farmers’ organisation.

African strengths in local leadership

Africa brings its own wealth of experience in transforming cooperation into locally meaningful practice. Mozambique’s UNAC peasant movement showed how farmers’ organisations can shape agricultural strategies through collective agency, while city governments across Africa, from Kampala to Kigali, are pioneering digital revenue mobilisation and social protection pilots. These are not isolated cases but part of a bigger African story: solutions that succeed are those that start with community realities and build upward.

This is precisely why South-South cooperation matters. It creates opportunities for African and Latin American and Caribbean actors to learn from one another’s innovations, co-develop approaches, and avoid repeating costly mistakes. Not by replicating each other’s models, but by adapting and improving them together.

The Diaspora link

The African diaspora in Latin America and the Caribbean, around 133 million people with shared roots, forms a unique bridge for these exchanges.

Afro-descendant communities in Brazil, particularly quilombola farmers, maintain ecological farming systems that preserve African knowledge traditions while innovating in Brazil’s diverse landscapes. Cooperation between quilombola and African farmers is not symbolic but practical, offering resilient agricultural strategies that respond to climate realities on both sides of the Atlantic.

Areas for opportunity

South-South cooperation presents exciting opportunities across a broad range of critical sectors for Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean. Key areas include deepening city-to-city exchanges focused on municipal finance and urban governance, as well as encouraging diaspora-driven and community-based knowledge sharing in health, education, agriculture, disaster risk reduction, financial inclusion, and creative industries. 

Equally important are collaborative innovations in infrastructure, critical minerals for the energy transition, the development of renewable energy, and methane abatement. 

Supporting bold experimentation with locally designed social policies, and finding ways to tailor and adapt international models to Africa’s and Latin America’s and the Caribbean’s diverse contexts can further strengthen these ties. 

By moving away from traditional top-down partnerships and centering real-world experience and local creativity, these regions can jointly shape resilient, sustainable progress with global relevance.

Global momentum and contemporary dialogues

Recent global dialogues underscore the rising consensus on the importance of South-South cooperation as a sustainable development driver. For example, participants at the Caribbean Week of Agriculture 2025 highlighted the need to expand partnerships that connect agriculture, knowledge sharing, and community action across southern regions. The World Economic Forum has pointed to how economic progress is increasingly shaped by South-South and triangular cooperation that fosters shared growth beyond hierarchical donor-recipient relationships. Meanwhile, UNESCO’s reports stress building sustainable synergies among universities, communities, and governments, emphasising innovation and capacity building as pillars. These conversations echo and reinforce the call for investment in subnational systems where cooperation translates into real-world impact.

A shared strategic imperative

Africa faces a $194 billion annual financing gap for the SDGs. Latin America and the Caribbean face their own fiscal pressures. In this context, it becomes critical that resources are channeled where they deliver the highest impact. Subnational cooperation offers exactly that: it builds capacity where services are delivered, legitimises national policies, and creates durable systems of accountability.

The promise of South-South cooperation is not about borrowing wholesale models, nor about symbolic gestures of solidarity. It is about generating new knowledge together, rooted in community realities and strengthened by diaspora connections. 

The future of cooperation will be shaped not in declarations between Brazilia and Addis Ababa, but in the practical partnerships linking Salvador and Lagos, Cartagena and Dakar, Dar es Salaam and Recife, farmer unions in Mozambique and quilombola communities in Brazil, alongside Nigerian fishermen and fishermen in Jamaica.

Africa and Latin America and the Caribbean both have significant youth populations, presenting immense opportunities alongside demographic pressures. 

These young people are critical drivers of economic and social development across their regions, making it all the more essential to build cooperation models that reflect their realities and potential.

Now is the moment to deepen South-South cooperation, where African, Latin American, and Caribbean priorities intersect, to forge a new generation of partnerships that are evidence-led and community-built, investing in the future generations these regions will depend on.