Source: United Nations 4
Following are UN Deputy Secretary-General Amina Mohammed’s opening remarks, as prepared for delivery, on the occasion of Africa Day at the High-level Political Forum 2025:
It is a great honour to join you here today.
As we celebrate Africa Day within this High-Level Political Forum, we gather not only to take stock, but to bear witness to something extraordinary: a continent that refuses to be defined by its starting point but instead chooses to measure itself by how far it has travelled.
Make no mistake: Africa began its sustainable development journey on the back foot. Colonial legacies that took wealth and left behind fractured institutions. Climate catastrophes that wash away decades of progress in a single season. Conflicts that force entire populations to abandon everything they have built. These are daily realities that test the resolve of every African nation.
Yet here we stand, with 10 countries presenting their Voluntary National Reviews this year as testaments to resilience. Angola achieving its strongest economic growth in a decade while building over 12,000 new schools. Ethiopia sustaining remarkable growth while powering its entire electrical grid from renewable sources. The Gambia driving robust development across agriculture, tourism and services.
These efforts are part of a broader continental push to realize the vision of Agenda 2063 and the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development. In the Voluntary National Reviews, we see that vision coming to life. More than 100 other Voluntary National Reviews have been prepared in the last decade since the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) were adopted and tell promising stories of progress across the Continent.
But let us be clear on the full scale of the challenges facing Africa. When a country like Sudan facing conflict sees the vast majority of its factories destroyed with unemployment soaring to crushing levels, we are reminded that progress is neither linear nor guaranteed.
When young people across our continent still struggle to find decent work, we know that our most precious resource — our youth — still faces barriers that deny them their rightful place in building tomorrow’s Africa.
When Africa gets the fundamentals right, like quality education for every child, the path to higher ground becomes clearer. Digital transformation, climate resilience, economic justice: these are no longer distant summits, but peaks within reach, and Africa has always been a continent of climbers.
Consider the women breaking barriers across our continent. In parliaments from Rwanda to Eswatini to Ghana, women are claiming seats of power once denied to them. Across Lesotho, widows now possess rights over family property that previous generations could never imagine. Each a seismic shift in how African societies recognize the power and potential of half their population.
Our youth, too, are not passive recipients of change — they are its architects. From Nigeria’s digital revolution to technology driven governance in Seychelles to Morocco’s role in advancing AI [artificial intelligence] research, young Africans are coding and designing the future every step of the way.
That said, we should not romanticize the road ahead. At this moment, at this rate, the SDGs are beyond reach in Africa. We have five years to 2030. Five years to transform systems that took decades to build. Five years to close gaps, and the widest gap remains finance.
Finance is the engine of progress. Without it, schools don’t get built, clinics stay empty, and peace remains out of reach. The global financial system is not working for Africa. Borrowing costs are too high, debt burdens are too heavy, and the money that could change lives is tied up in systems that are too slow, too narrow, and too risk averse.
The Sevilla Commitment is a step forward, a promise to get resources flowing faster, fairer and at the scale we need. The next five years will test not only our ambition, but our ability to deliver on the most basic promises of dignity and justice — especially in the areas where progress remains most elusive.
Many women still face gender-based violence that steals their safety, their dignity, and their dreams. We must dismantle the structural barriers that persist like shadows, following women from childhood through their adult lives. Our young people deserve more than we have given them. We must invest urgently in skills development, particularly in the digital and green sectors where Africa can lead the world.
The bigger picture also betrays an all-too-present imbalance: too often, African countries are absent from the tables where global decisions are made, yet they are first to feel the impact.
The Pact for the Future is working to change that. It calls for more inclusive, representative global governance that reflects today’s realities, not a snapshot of yesterday. It recognizes that sustainable development cannot be built on a foundation of exclusion, and by adopting the Pact, countries committed to ensuring Africa is where it belongs: at the table, shaping the decisions that shape our world. And we are taking the necessary steps to ensure that countries have the UN support and capacity needed to do just that.
The Secretary-General’s UN80 Initiative also builds on the existing reforms and plots an ambitious path forward to ensure that those we serve have the optimal level and type of capacity in country.
Africa’s journey toward 2030, 2063 and beyond is not a sprint, it’s a relay race, where each nation, each community, each individual, carries the baton forward.
The Africa Sustainable Development Report that we are launching today represents both the progress, and the challenges, from a continent still writing its greatest chapter. It is a declaration that future generations will inherit not the limitations we face, but the possibilities we create. Above all, they speak to a refusal to accept that history determines destiny.
I want to thank the African Union, the Economic Commission of Africa, the African Development Bank and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) for preparing this crucial piece of work. Let it be our map for the road ahead. Let us build on the foundation of commitment it represents.
The relay baton is in our hands. The finish line is in sight, and from what I have seen, African nations — resilient, determined, unstoppable — are ready to run.
MIL OSI United Nations News –
