Preamble
On the 7th September 2025, the Africa Peoples’ Assembly on the margins of the 2nd Africa Climate Summit, led by Climate Action Network (CAN) Africa, the International Trade Union Confederation Africa (ITUC-Africa), and the Africa Movement of Movements, convened in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
We, the peoples of Africa, including social movements and civil society, trade unions, women, youth, people with disabilities, Indigenous Peoples, grassroots communities, farmers, faith-based groups, media, and academia, gathered to commit to this Declaration on Africa’s climate and development priorities and demands.
This Peoples’ Assembly was a space of collective power, where African voices defined what justice, sovereignty, and resilience must mean for our continent. We reject the business-as-usual model that reduces Africa to a pawn in the agendas of others, whether through extractivism, debt traps, or false climate solutions imposed from outside.
This Declaration sets out what Africa must pursue, what we as peoples commit to fight for, and what we demand of our governments, regional bodies, and international institutions in spaces such as the Africa Climate Summit, or COP30 and beyond.
We recognise that if Africa does not plan and act for its own destiny, it will remain trapped in cycles of exploitation, resource theft, and recolonisation.
Download file: https://can-africa.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Africa-Peoples-Declaration-2025-Draft.pdf