The Coca-Cola Company Nigeria, Sterling Bank Limited, and the United Nations Global Compact Network Nigeria have restated their commitment to advancing social impact across the continent by supporting the hosting of the Africa Social Impact Summit for the third year in a row, convening over 2,000 development leaders and professionals recently.
This move, which furthers each of the organizations’ commitment to driving more impact investment into critical sectors of the African economy while building stronger partnerships for the SDGs, can best be described as the type of long-term effort needed to tackle the continent’s developmental challenges.
Back in 2022, the partners helped launch the Africa Social Impact Summit (ASIS) as a convening for investors, policymakers, and development leaders within the public and private sectors to help accelerate the achievement of the SDGs in Africa and have stayed true to this mission.
“ASIS is designed to address the COVID-19 setbacks faced by the African continent in achieving progress on the SDGs, amongst other development challenges by leveraging partnerships and we are grateful to have these partners who have been on board with the idea from Day 1,” explained Olapeju Ibekwe, CEO of Sterling One Foundation.
She added that the partners’ commitment to making a real impact has been instrumental to the successes recorded by the Summit.
So far, the Summit has been instrumental to facilitating investments above ₦3billion, with this year’s edition alone unlocking over $1 million for impactful projects. Across the 3 editions, the Summit has delivered insights from over 120 experts working across the globe in different economic development roles, making it the perfect forum for new thinking on solutions for key African challenges.
Two key focus areas of the Summit are climate action and women empowerment which are important sectors for most of its partners, especially Coca-Cola which has been at the forefront of enabling progress in both spaces through initiatives such as the 5by20 Initiative, its water stewardship initiatives, and numerous waste management grants to local partners helping to make recycling commonplace.
Amaka Onyemelukwe, Senior Director, Public Affairs, Communications and Sustainability at Coca-Cola Nigeria explained that partnership has always been at the core of the company’s strategy, making ASIS an important initiative to be a part of.
“What the Summit hopes to achieve in terms of effective regional partnerships is crucial for the development ecosystem in Africa and we are glad to support and help move it from ideas to action,” she mentioned.
The Africa Social Impact Summit which is convened by the Sterling One Foundation alongside the United Nations System in Nigeria, and a host of private-sector, media, and development partners aims to not only advocate better policies and build stronger partnerships but to become a platform for more impact investments, for both entrepreneurs and changemakers with impact-focused projects as well as for government development projects.
The third edition of the Summit perfectly captured this with an Investors’ Roundtable hosted by the Lagos State Government and the 3rd ASIS Deal Room which saw the signing of two deals worth $200,000 by ArtisanOga and PressPay, both tech startups in the talent management and education spaces. The fourth edition of the Summit is billed to be held in the second quarter of 2025.
