African Heads of State and Government will convene in the Ethiopian capital on 14 and 15 February, following the 39th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of the African Union (AU), held from 11 February.
The issue of water as a vital resource is the official theme of 2026 for the AU.
Addressing the executive council meeting this week, Chairperson of the AU Commission, Mahmoud Ali Youssouf, emphasised the critical importance of the theme on water and sanitation, framing water as a vital collective resource that must be preserved amid climate change and leveraged as a tool for peace and cooperation among member states.
"In the face of observed climate disruptions, the prudent use of water in all aspects of daily life is a major imperative. This vital resource must be perceived as a collective good to be preserved at all costs and as a vector for bringing our States closer together and for peace," Ali Youssouf said in a press briefing.
However, peace and security issues are likely to be at the top of the summit agenda.
'Heightened global uncertainty'
Angola, under President João Lourenço, has been holding the AU chairmanship for 2025. Now, Burundi is set to assume the rotating presidency with its President, Évariste Ndayishimiye, to be named the AU Chairman for 2026.
But across Africa, democratic and human rights regression, contested elections, repression of dissent, and prolonged states of emergency are testing the credibility of governance institutions.
This week, the Chairperson of the AUC received the Secretary-General of the UN, António Guterres, at the AU Headquarters in Addis Ababa, and discussed strengthening multilateralism at a time of "heightened global uncertainty", and the need to "advance peace, security and sustainable development."
The Chairperson of the AUC also expressed concern over "political instability, security crises, and unconstitutional changes of government, noting progress in Gabon and Guinea but setbacks in Madagascar and Guinea-Bissau, while underscoring the persistent terrorist threats in the Sahel and Horn of Africa."
"While there has been regression and progress is minimal, our mediators are active," noted the AUC Chairperson.
"The Summit comes against a backdrop of intensifying global fragmentation, shrinking multilateralism, escalating conflicts, deepening debt distress, and growing climate stress," Desire Assogbavi, an international development strategist and currently an advocacy advisor for Africa at the Open Society Foundations wrote in his yearly analysis ahead of the summit.
Internal weaknesses
The African Union, if praised for being one of the biggest international organisations in the world and a really important tool for Africa, is also often described for being "very much inefficient", according to Clionadh Raleigh, the director of ACLED, the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data organisation and professor of African politics and conflict at the University of Sussex in England. She even thinks it is "beyond inefficient".
"It's totally incompetent. Totally. It has a singular job to represent a coalition of African states. It can't do that internally," she told me. And It certainly can't do that externally."
She reckons that Africa needs it, however, and that Africans are being let down by the processes in the AU, which are "factionalised and bureaucratic and just generally incompetent."
"And people are able to see this outside," she added. "If you're an organisation, a business, or a government such as the Trump administration, you're going to try to make sure that you benefit from those factions or those."
Conflicts with no resolution
While the ongoing conflicts in Sudan, eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the Sahel, and Libya continue to inflict devastating civilian harm, others have reemerged, in South Sudan, the Sahel and Ethiopia notably, exposing the limits of security solutions.
Chairman Youssouf expressed "deep concern" over the continent's endless crises, but has limited scope to act, according to the International Crisis Group (ICG) in a recent report, "at a time when the AU is needed the most, it is arguably at its weakest since it was inaugurated."
Spokesman Nuur Mohamud Sheekh told news agencies that "the AU has helped de-escalate political tensions and support dialogue before situations descend into violence," citing the work done to prevent war between Sudan and South Sudan over the flashpoint region of Abyei.
But the fact is that the leaders have not been able to come with any solution for Sudan or the DRC.
The AU summit should be "an opportunity for decisive AU leadership on Sudan", for the UK-based think tank Chatham House, but "it must not be missed", as Hubert Kinkoh, Mo Ibrahim Foundation Academy Fellow, Africa Programme, wrote.
"The 2026 AU summit presents a narrow but critical window to reset the continental response. Without decisive action, Sudan risks irreversible fragmentation: de facto regional administrations could consolidate, national institutions could collapse entirely, and cross-border spillovers could intensify," he penned.
He added that Sudan is a defining test for the AU and its commitment to "the principles of constitutional order, non-indifference and civilian protection."
US threats
The summit also occurs as the Trump administration in the US changed its stance on Africa on many levels. US interventions in Africa have multiplied, from the cuts to foreign aid, his diplomatic war with South Africa during the G20 to the recent strikes on Nigeria, but also a keen interest in the continent's critical minerals, especially in the vulnerable DRC.
Frederic Mousseau is the policy director at the Oakland Institute, which supports Congolese lawyers and human rights defenders putting a challenge at the Constitutional Court in DRC around the US DRC Strategic Partnership Agreement, signed alongside the peace deal on 4 December 2025, in Washington, DC.
He told me that "the US is indeed moving very aggressively".
"This deal doesn't appear to be to the advantage of the Congolese; it is about private US interests and corporations," Mousseau said. "There's very little about the economic benefits, the returns for the population. And there's very little about the victims of the war, those who have been suffering for years, decades of this war in the East, which is a very serious concern.
The US's interest in African states is to "make room for their own corporations to have extremely favorable terms in how they operate within that country," according to ACLED's Raleigh.
"There is no concern for not just how the citizens will benefit from their own natural endowments, and there's also no concern for the violence that is part of this whole system. So we're looking for more violent times," she concluded.
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* Read also:
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