By Faisal Mkhize, Managing Executive for Business Development at Absa Business Banking

Much has been said about the 46th SADC Summit and what it may mean for the 16 countries trying, with varying degrees of success, to prise integration out of the communiqués and declarations that have arguably carried the idea further than the region in practice sometimes has. Somewhere in the rush to make sense of the bigger questions around Southern Africa’s place in a more fractious world, however, a smaller idea was buried beneath the headlines. Smaller only in the amount of attention it received because, taken seriously, it asks us to reconsider who this project is actually being built for and where its economic weight will ultimately have to come from.

A few days before the heads of state gathered for the formal business of it all, President Cyril Ramaphosa said during a public lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal that “Southern Africa’s industrial revolution will ultimately not be driven by the large conglomerates listed on stock exchanges, but by the tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses that bring innovation, agility and competitiveness to the economy.”

It is an interesting idea and a Herculean task in roughly equal measure, though also the direction Southern Africa should be travelling in, because the businesses being placed at the heart of that future still operate in a regional economy that becomes markedly less hospitable the moment they try to grow beyond home.

SADC has not, of course, spent the past three decades in limbo, and it would be churlish to pretend otherwise when so much of the cooperation machinery has been assembled over that time, even if a few of its more ambitious parts have acquired the slightly permanent air of work still in progress (the stubborn customs union comes to mind here). What has been harder to shake is the habit of imagining growth from the top down, with progress judged largely by what states agree and by the movement of firms already big enough to take advantage of those arrangements. Small businesses have featured in the policy architecture, certainly, but rarely as the economic engine around which the wider project should be designed, even though the weighting of the economy has been telling us for some time that they ought to be.

SMEs account for more than 90% of business establishments across SADC and more than 60% of employment, which makes their relatively faint presence in cross-border commerce all the more striking. Their contribution to exports is estimated at around 12%, a figure that looks particularly anaemic beside the European Union, where SMEs account for roughly 34% of exports directly and as much as 58% once their contribution through larger exporters is traced through the supply chain. Even ASEAN, whose economies offer a more useful comparison in several respects, draws close to 30% of its exports from SMEs.

The good news is that there is now a more deliberate attempt to confront exactly this problem.

SADC’s SME Development and Competitiveness Strategy, taken forward in Madagascar last year and now guiding the period to 2029, is probably the clearest effort yet to gather the scattered pieces of SME development into one regional view. The strategy focuses on improving the policy environment in which SMEs operate, strengthening entrepreneurship and skills, expanding access to technology and support infrastructure, opening more routes to market, and improving access to finance. If implemented well, it would be a decisive step in creating a more enabling environment for SME growth across the region, though in truth it would still only take us part of the way.

The real swing would come in making that thinking far more deliberate at the level of SMEs, by seeing SADC’s economies less as neighbouring markets competing for the same opportunities and more as parts of a wider productive system in which different strengths can reinforce one another.

Too often, progress is seen through a nationalistic lens, with each government trying to deepen its own industrial base and attract investment on its own terms. There is an understandable logic to that, considering the unique pressure each country faces to create jobs and sustain economic growth, but taken too far it can leave sixteen markets trying to reproduce the same capabilities in parallel, and often in competition, when some of what they are trying to build already exists elsewhere in the region and could be put to work more deliberately across borders.

The ambition would no longer be to help a business in one country sell more into another; it would be to build regional value chains in which small businesses from different markets participate according to what they do well, combining those strengths into products and services that can compete more convincingly beyond the region.

In many ways, that is the kind of economic behaviour AfCFTA will eventually depend on anyway, except that Southern Africa has the advantage of being able to practise the habit at a more immediate scale first. Ask many SMEs what AfCFTA means for them today and they are likely to tell you it still feels too large and too abstract to make much difference to their businesses. Getting this right within SADC could begin to change that by giving them something more tangible: the experience of seeing that growth across borders is actually possible.

And the case for getting on with it has a much sharper edge because sovereignty these days is being negotiated as much through economic dependence as through politics.

In the same lecture, President Ramaphosa argued that “the welfare of our people and the sovereignty and security of our nations require that we work with greater diligence and purpose to build an integrated Southern African market.” Southern Africa will always trade with the world, and should, but there is a difference between being open to the world and being structurally exposed to it. The more of the region’s productive life that can be carried through businesses trading with one another, the less every external shock has to arrive here with quite the same force.

A denser network of small businesses trading across SADC would not make the region self-sufficient, nor is that the goal. What it would do is anchor more of Southern Africa’s economic agency in the ordinary workings of its own businesses, with value created in one market feeding activity in another and giving the region a thicker commercial base from which to deal with the rest of the world.

Nairobi, Kenya / Johannesburg, South Africa

Absa Group Limited has announced its intention to launch a tender offer to acquire up to approximately 896 million ordinary shares in Absa Bank Kenya PLC from eligible shareholders.

Absa Group currently owns approximately 68.5% of Absa Bank Kenya. If the tender offer is fully accepted, the Group’s shareholding would increase to a maximum of 85%, representing the acquisition of up to 16.5% of the bank’s issued share capital.

The proposed transaction reflects Absa Group’s long-term confidence in Absa Bank Kenya, Kenya’s banking sector, and the broader East African market. It supports the Group’s pan-African growth strategy and its commitment to strengthening its presence in high-growth markets across the continent.

“Kenya is a strategically important market for Absa Group and remains central to our East Africa growth ambitions,” said Charles Russon, Group Executive: Africa Regions. “This proposed transaction reflects our confidence in Absa Bank Kenya’s leadership, strategy and long-term growth prospects, as well as our continued commitment to supporting Kenya’s economic development.”

Absa Group intends to maintain Absa Bank Kenya’s listing on the Nairobi Securities Exchange following completion of the tender offer. The Group does not intend, as a result of the offer, to change the bank’s business strategy, executive management team, employee base, or day-to-day operations.

The proposed transaction relates solely to Absa Bank Kenya’s shareholding structure and will have no impact on customers, products, services, branches, accounts or day-to-day banking operations. Absa Bank Kenya will continue to serve customers as normal.

Providing shareholders with a choice

The tender offer will provide eligible shareholders with the opportunity to sell some or all of their shares should they wish to do so. Shareholders who choose not to participate will not be required to take any action.
The offer price will be KES 34,50 per ordinary share, subject to the final approved terms of the tender offer.

Shareholders are encouraged to read the tender offer document in full once it becomes available and to seek advice from their stockbroker, custodian, investment bank, or other professional adviser if they are uncertain about any aspect of the offer.

Regulatory status

The proposed tender offer remains subject to regulatory approvals from the Capital Markets Authority (CMA). The offer will not commence until the necessary approvals have been obtained.

Offer process

Once the tender offer opens, eligible shareholders who wish to participate will be able to submit acceptances through the channels detailed in the tender offer document. These are expected to include electronic application channels, mobile or USSD options where applicable, and physical tender forms through authorised acceptance agents.

The offer is expected to remain open for 30 business days, subject to the final approved timetable. Any changes will be communicated through the appropriate regulatory channels.

Important notice

This media release is provided for information purposes only and does not constitute an offer, invitation, recommendation or investment advice. The tender offer will be made solely on the terms and conditions contained in the official tender offer document and acceptance form once issued.

Approval of the tender offer document by the CMA, if granted, should not be interpreted as an endorsement of the offer or a recommendation to Absa Bank Kenya shareholders.

About Absa Group

Absa Group Limited (‘Absa Group’) is listed on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange and is one of Africa’s largest diversified financial services groups.

Absa Group offers an integrated set of products and services across personal and business banking, corporate and investment banking, wealth and investment management and insurance.

Absa Group owns majority stakes in banks in Botswana, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania (Absa Bank Tanzania and National Bank of Commerce), Uganda and Zambia and has insurance operations in Kenya and South Africa. Absa also has representative offices in Namibia, Nigeria and the United States, a registered financial services entity in the People’s Republic of China, as well as securities entities in the United Kingdom and the United States, along with technology support colleagues in the Czech Republic.

For further information about Absa Group Limited, visit www.absa.africa
Media queries: Daniel Munslow, Managing Executive: Group Communications
M +27 71 347 6915
E daniel.munslow@absa.africa

By Nellyana Mmanyi, Corporate Banking Director, Absa Bank Tanzania

Global trade is being reshaped by geopolitics, as supply chains fragment and new alliances redraw the map of commerce. For Africa, this is not just disruption, it’s a strategic opening. In this pivotal decade, as companies diversify sourcing and rethink trade routes, the continent, particularly East Africa, is emerging as a critical connector between global markets.

Converting this moment into meaningful growth will depend on reducing friction, improving access to trade finance and enabling businesses to move with speed and certainty. This is where banks can play a fundamental role.

As change interrupts existing ways of trade, there’s a palpable shift from efficiency to resilience. Corporates are diversifying their supply chains, reducing single country dependence, for example, on China. They’re favouring nearshoring and friendshoring, expanding into Southern East Asia and India. Trade routes are becoming more regional and more complex with multiple sourcing and transit options built in to manage geopolitical risk.

More corridor-based trade routes are emerging. Trading based on proximity to geopolitical markets is increasing. For example, importing fuel from the Middle East to Tanzania is difficult, with significant delays because of logistical issues related to Iran.

Africa is increasingly acting as both a production base and a trade connector with the Middle East and Asia. We see this in agriculture, business, manufacturing and the transit trade which is supported by improving port infrastructure and growing regional integration.

East Africa is no longer just a future opportunity—it is already emerging as a strategic trade bridge, with the region firmly positioned as one of the continent’s key growth hubs. The increasing interest from major international and regional banks seeking to establish or expand their presence here is a clear indication of where Africa’s growth momentum lies.

From a logistics and trade perspective, East Africa plays a pivotal gateway role. The Port of Dar es Salaam, for example, is a critical entry point supporting land-linked markets such as the DRC, Zambia, Uganda, and Rwanda. This importance is further reinforced by ongoing investments in key transport corridors, including Tanzania’s Central Corridor and Kenya’s Northern Corridor, which continue to enhance connectivity and facilitate trade across the region.

However, pragmatic barriers still prevent businesses from fully capitalising on these new trade opportunities. Despite the momentum, the execution challenges remain significant. The main constraints are logistical inefficiencies, regulatory fragmentation like non-trade barriers across African markets, customs inefficiencies and inconsistent policies in East Africa. Slow implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) at an operational level is a concern and foreign exchange volatility and market access to trade finance, particularly for SMEs, remain an obstacle. While there is demand for their goods, they struggle with execution across borders. Logistical inefficiencies in terms of infrastructure, like port communication, railroad inefficiencies, potholes and a lack of tarmac, coupled with high inland transport costs, all hinder successful trade.

Financial institutions can support clients in navigating these complexities. To be successful in a competitive market, banks must differentiate themselves by moving beyond transactions to end-to-end trade enablement. At Absa, we are seeing growing demand from corporates for integrated cross-border banking support that combines trade finance, foreign exchange solutions and regional market expertise. Clients are looking not just for funding, but for banking partners that can help them navigate increasingly complex trade corridors with speed and certainty. Banks must therefore offer not just vanilla letters of credit, or overdraft facilities, but flexible trade finance and structured trade solutions.

Speed as a differentiator is critical. Ultimately the bank that moves fastest wins the client.

Looking ahead, multiple factors will determine whether Africa truly captures this moment or misses the golden opportunity. Success will depend on five factors.

Firstly, the implementation of the AfCFTA is paramount, to move from policy to real trade flows and reducing non-tariff barriers.

Secondly, infrastructure delivery, for ports, rail and energy investment, must translate into efficiency and not just capacity.

We need to improve access to capital by bridging the trade finance gap and supporting the SME-sized corporates to upscale regionally.

Fourth, is an industrialisation focus and a shift from raw export materials to value added production and the involvement of regional supply chains.

Lastly, institutional coordination in terms of alignment between government, banks and the private sector is critical. We need policy consistency and investor confidence.

Africa, East Africa in particular, has a remarkable opportunity to position itself in global trade, not only in terms of its excellent existing market, but as a connector and a production hub. Success won’t be automatic. It will depend on the speed of execution, access to capital and the ability of banking institutions to actively enable clients across the trade value chain. The opportunity is real, but it won’t wait.

By Loffie Brandt, Sector Executive for Agriculture at Absa AgriBusiness

For a long time, agricultural risk in Africa was understood through a relatively familiar set of pressures, whether around rainfall and weather patterns, commodity prices, input costs, access to finance, or the practical realities of moving products through supply chains that often struggled even under normal conditions. Difficult, certainly, but still manageable within a system whose participants broadly understood its rhythms. What has changed, particularly over the past decade, is that the risk environment surrounding African agriculture has become far more interconnected and far less predictable.

Take climate change, for instance. In some parts of the continent, rain now arrives heavily over very short periods before disappearing again. At the same time, floods, mid-season droughts, and highly localised weather disruptions have started appearing much more frequently. Many producers now factor some form of climate disruption into almost every season, partly because conditions can shift dramatically even across relatively short distances and partly because the timing itself has become far more difficult to anticipate consistently from one year to the next.

The same interconnectedness applies to geopolitical risk as well. The conflict in the Middle East has already shown how quickly events far outside the continent can feed back into African agriculture through higher freight costs and shipping disruptions across key export routes. For exporters already operating on tight margins and highly time-sensitive supply chains, those disruptions carry immediate commercial consequences because even relatively short delays can affect pricing, quality and market access simultaneously.

The pressure point many farmers are feeling most acutely at the moment, and likely will continue feeling for some time, is the rise in input costs, particularly around fertiliser and energy.

Urea prices moved above $700 per tonne earlier this year, with upward pressure spreading across other fertiliser categories as supply chains tightened and global uncertainty filtered further into agricultural input markets. Producers who had not secured supply early suddenly found themselves entering planting periods under far more pressure around pricing, particularly as higher crude prices also pushed fuel costs sharply upwards across parts of the continent at exactly the point where diesel demand typically begins accelerating during planting and harvesting cycles.

The reality is that many of these pressures no longer behave like temporary disruptions that businesses can simply wait out until conditions normalise again: the operating environment itself has changed. More producers are starting to recognise that resilience now depends less on getting through a difficult season and more on building operations capable of absorbing repeated instability over longer periods of time.

The difficult reality now is that meaningful adjustments are often hard to make midway through difficult periods because agricultural cycles do not move at the same speed as geopolitical events or commodity markets. Much depends on what is being produced and how exposed producers are to changing input costs or weakening prices. Grain producers, for example, are currently operating in a global market carrying high stock levels, which continues placing downward pressure on prices even as fertiliser and fuel costs rise.

Other producers face different pressures altogether, particularly where export markets tighten or demand weakens unexpectedly, forcing businesses to look for alternative markets or different routes to market, often within very short timeframes.

But part of the challenge is that difficult times rarely create only downside pressure. They also create periods of temporary dislocation where opportunities emerge unexpectedly for businesses capable of moving quickly enough to respond to them. Increasingly, resilience in agriculture depends not only on surviving volatility, but on maintaining enough liquidity and operational agility to adapt when conditions change suddenly in either direction.

And that is why cash flow is really at the heart of resilience. That may come through retained cash inside the business itself or through the ability to access external funding when needed. At Absa AgriBusiness, we are increasingly seeing producers prioritise financial flexibility and liquidity as core to their long-term resilience planning. Either way, businesses carrying healthier balance sheets generally retain far more flexibility once markets come under pressure.

Some producers are also leaning more heavily into crop insurance, others into geographic or production diversification. Many have spent the past few years focusing on technology and improving operational efficiency. All these efforts aim to strengthen margins and ultimately generate additional cash flow within the business itself.

None of these decisions remove volatility from agriculture entirely, but they do influence how much room a business has to absorb pressure once conditions become unstable.

As farming conditions become harder to predict through traditional models alone, financial institutions like Absa will increasingly have to rely on far more granular operational data in order to assess risk appropriately and support producers more effectively through volatile cycles. The reality is that large amounts of agricultural data are already being generated across farms every season, whether around yields, planting conditions, weather patterns, input usage, or production practices. The bigger challenge is in how that information is actually incorporated into funding and risk-assessment models in ways that create practical value for producers.

African agriculture is entering a period where resilience will be determined heavily by access to capital and the ability to remain operational under unstable conditions that may persist for extended periods of time. For producers, financiers, and value-chain participants alike, this requires thinking far more carefully about how businesses are structured before the next disruption arrives, not once it is already underway.

By Johnson Idesoh, Group Chief Information and Technology Officer at Absa

For the past three or four years, the world has lived through what is probably the fastest adoption of a general-purpose technology in modern economic history, with systems becoming embedded in ordinary working life so quickly that companies, governments, and regulators have often struggled to understand the implications at the same speed that employees and consumers were already adapting their behaviour around them. And the economic implications became impossible to ignore almost immediately.

Analysts now estimate that AI could contribute trillions of dollars to global GDP over the next decade, although what has arguably mattered more in the short term is the speed with which corporate behaviour changed once executives realised this was no longer a speculative technology discussion but something capable of altering fundamentals like cost structures, labour requirements, customer engagement models, and competitive positioning simultaneously. And yet there is already a growing sense, particularly among the companies building these systems, that the generative AI boom may ultimately be remembered as only the beginning of a much larger technological transition: agentic AI and autonomous AI agents.

If generative AI introduced systems capable of producing human-like outputs from prompts, agentic AI pushes further into decision-making and execution, allowing software not merely to respond to instructions but to pursue objectives with a degree of independence that earlier systems simply did not possess. In practical terms, rather than asking an AI to complete a single task in isolation, a user might assign a broader objective altogether, such as improving customer onboarding, resolving compliance bottlenecks, or identifying unusual transaction patterns – all areas becoming increasingly relevant for financial institutions such as Absa -after which the system determines for itself which steps need to be taken, which software tools to access, which sub-tasks to prioritise, and how to adapt if the initial approach fails – with minimal human intervention.

The question now is what this next phase of AI means for Africa.

Every major technological transition tends to expose the same underlying divide in the global economy: the countries and companies building foundational systems accumulate disproportionate economic power, while those arriving later often settle into the role of consumers and downstream adopters of technologies designed elsewhere. There is a risk that AI follows a similar pattern, particularly as the infrastructure underpinning it consolidates within a relatively small number of countries and firms.

And yet Africa’s technology story has often unfolded differently from conventional expectations. The continent’s digital evolution has rarely followed the linear path seen in developed economies, partly because institutional gaps and infrastructure constraints created pressure for entirely different forms of innovation. Mobile money, for example, emerged in environments where large segments of the population had never fully entered traditional banking system, a shift Absa has witnessed across multiple African markets over the past decade, and fintech ecosystems expanded rapidly because millions of consumers were already solving practical problems around payments, identity, access, and informality long before regulators and incumbent institutions had fully adjusted to the scale of the shift underway. Combined with one of the youngest populations in the world and accelerating smartphone adoption, this created conditions where new forms of digital behaviour spread far faster than institutional systems were prepared for.

In many respects, Africa became accustomed to technological leapfrogging precisely because existing systems were incomplete, and the same conditions that once spurred mobile-first innovation across the continent may now create an unexpected advantage as AI moves into its next phase.

The countries that will benefit most are likely to be those investing early in people, governance, and locally relevant application. Africa’s young population represents a major advantage here, but only if young people are equipped to shape these technologies themselves rather than experience them primarily as consumers of systems designed elsewhere. It will also require stronger coordination between banks, regulators, telecommunications companies, technology firms, and policymakers as autonomous systems begin integrating more deeply into everyday economic activity, something Absa believes will be critical to ensuring AI adoption remains trusted, secure and inclusive. Most importantly, agentic AI in Africa has to solve African problems in ways that feel practical and grounded, whether around financial inclusion, small business growth, fraud prevention, or expanding access to reliable services.

The generative AI boom may have introduced the world to machine intelligence. The agentic era will test which societies are able to apply it in ways that actually widen human and economic possibility.

By Elvis Ndunguru, Managing Executive, Absa Corporate and Investment Banking, NBC, Tanzania

East Africa, led by Kenya, is emerging as a powerful trade hub driven by infrastructure investment, regional integration and expanding intra-African trade. As a gateway for natural resources, it boasts rare earths, gold, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and other commodities the world needs.

Trade finance is the key to unlocking cross-border flows, supporting SMEs and enabling regional value chains, opening up economic benefits for the region.

As East African trade accelerates, better Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policies have a stronger bearing on the Tanzanian mainland and Zanzibar, attracting capital movement. As stronger regional demand reshapes trade patterns, increased urbanisation and population growth are driving intra-African trade in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), construction materials, and processed goods. Improving macro-stability boosts investability as better fiscal and monetary management emerge.

But global flows demand dependence on solid infrastructure. As corridor-led infrastructure unlocks trade flows, investments in establishing ports, rail, and roads enables trade in new ways. For example, the Port of Mombasa and the Standard Gauge Railway are reducing transit times and connecting important inland markets like Uganda and Rwanda. Regional integration is being driven particularly under the East African Community (EAC) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), resulting in lowered tariff and non-tariff barriers.

Between South Tanzania and North Kenya, strategically placed ports improve both inter- and intra-continental trade flow. To bolster regional connectivity, Tanzania will spend 12 trillion shilling (TZS) on port expansions. Meanwhile, the $1.4 billion Tazara (Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority) Railway rehabilitation is underway. Kenya is investing in rail, and a new fuel pipeline is being established from Uganda to Tanzania. The Tanzania Standard Gauge Railway is indeed positioned to complement and strategically link with the Lobito Corridor, even though they originate in different parts of the continent. The strategic connection lies in creating a transcontinental logistics network for DRC: goods (especially critical minerals like copper and cobalt) can move more efficiently across Africa, either east to Indian Ocean markets or west to Atlantic routes. This reduces reliance on single export routes, improves resilience, and enhances intra-African trade under frameworks like the African Continental Free Trade Area.

These developments give life to new trade flows, like transporting fuel from Uganda to the Middle East, or moving copper from Congo to China.

In the SADC and EAC regions, comprising over half a billion people, the demand for goods and services, including fuel, is significant. Regional agreements must be fostered to harmonise customs, tariffs, regulations, and the movement of goods, people and services. Frameworks like the EAC Customs Union and AfCFTA have reduced tariffs, but the system is often plagued by border delays and inconsistent enforcement, which dilute the impact of trade.

If banks with trade finance capabilities, including institutions like Absa with a growing pan-African footprint, support infrastructure development, this will boost connectivity, lower transport costs, and improve trade opportunities. Currently, it’s cheaper to move goods from China to Dar es Salaam than to transport them from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza, a region within Tanzania.

Trade finance is most impactful in sectors with predictable cross-border demand on agriculture, energy, and FMCG. Structured trade finance and supply chain finance help large corporates extend terms to suppliers, indirectly supporting SME participation.

The East African economy is largely driven by SMEs. In Tanzania, 96% of our economy depends on SMEs, but they lack funding to support themselves. The majority are trade-based, with imports from the Middle East, China, India, and others, and exports like minerals or agri-commodities to other parts of the world. While banks can help support SMEs, the locals must also support them to benefit the local market.

Besides raising capital, risk perception and informality are constraints to their success. Better credit data with digital identities and scalable guarantee schemes backed by Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) help to mitigate risk. While simplified, digital trade finance products are now available, these are still limited. Anchor-led eco-systems with stronger linkage to large corporates is manifesting in the mining, FMCG, manufacturing and agricultural sectors.

DFIs as key stakeholders can work alongside financial institutions to help enhance trade routes. While it might be difficult for them to be on the ground, they can collaborate with the banks in certain markets within the continent to extend their reach.

To help digitisation, we must empower fintechs to enable much stronger platforms. In Tanzania, SME customers work together to collaborate on small platforms, to submit bulk orders to China. There’s strength in numbers.

Banks have capabilities to support trade flows and payment via digitisation in areas like Ethiopia and the DRC. While some markets like DRC are high-risk, our competitors are growing there. Last year, a regional bank made 30% of their profit in Congo, for example. We can find safe ways to play in those markets, selecting the sectors we can perform in.

Banks with a Pan-African presence, such as Absa, which operates across key trade corridors, must bring a true corridor strategy to build sector-specific solutions like agri-value chains across multiple countries; use digital platforms to serve mid-market clients, not just large corporates; partner with DFIs to expand risk appetite in frontier markets; and position themselves as a trade enabler, not just financiers, by integrating advisory, foreign exchange, and working capital solutions.

The real differentiator will be the ability to intermediate not just capital, but meaningful connectivity, helping to link clients across markets, currencies, and the supply chain.

Returning to Nairobi, Kenya on 12 and 13 May 2026, GTR East Africa brings together key stakeholders across trade, supply chain, commodity, infrastructure and export financing. As a Gold Sponsor of the event, Absa CIB reinforces its commitment to supporting trade and growth in the region.

By Daniel Munslow, Managing Executive: Group Communications, Absa Group

It was around the turn of the century that students in the fields of public relations and communications would have started encountering new curricula centred on what was then referred to as “new media” – an examination of the mainstreaming of the internet and the information platforms it enabled, and what all of this might mean for the more traditional practices the industry had become so attached to in the decades preceding.

Many would argue that the landscape has since undergone a profound and persistent rate of change, spurred forward largely by digital technologies and social media, which fundamentally altered who controls information and how it moves. Yet with the growing ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence, perhaps the most consequential development since those early debates around new media, attention is being drawn back to a much older question: trust.

To fully appreciate the correlation, it is worth considering the environment into which AI has arrived.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report for 2026 points to the emergence of a contested multipolar landscape in which confrontation is increasingly displacing collaboration, and trust is steadily losing value. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer paints a similar picture at a societal level, finding that seven in ten people globally exhibit what it describes as an insular mindset, characterised by an unwillingness or hesitation to trust those with different values, views, approaches to solving problems, or cultural backgrounds.

The role AI will ultimately play within this environment remains to be seen, but from a communications risk perspective, its implications are already becoming apparent in two areas: credibility and visibility.

For the first time, the cost and effort associated with producing content – whether written, visual, or audio – is falling dramatically, raising the prospect of a communications environment in which that content becomes almost limitless. That may be good news for productivity. It may even prove beneficial for creativity. But it also presents a challenge, because as content becomes easier to produce, communication may have to work harder to prove that it is worth believing.

The credibility question becomes particularly relevant when viewed against the growth of organised disinformation across the continent, with the Africa Center for Strategic Studies reporting that the 189 documented disinformation campaigns active in Africa today represent almost four times the number recorded in 2022, a figure it still regards as an undercount. The Centre notes that these campaigns have helped drive violence, validate military coups, silence civil society voices and obscure corruption, developments that many analysts have linked, at least in part, to the proliferation of AI, which has become a boon for content farms and misinformation networks.

This means that as audiences become more discerning and the volume of synthetic content continues to grow, organisations may find themselves having to work harder to establish the authenticity of their messages and the reliability of the information upon which they are based. It also means there is far more competition for attention, a reality that places emphasis on visibility, believability and an organisation’s ability to cut through.

Precisely how much content now being generated by AI is difficult to determine, although some early studies estimate that anywhere between 30% and 75% of the text appearing on active web pages may originate from AI-generated sources. Whether the true figure sits at the lower or upper end of that range is almost beside the point, what matters is that the proliferation of AI-generated content is already well underway and shows little sign of slowing.

Audiences may not always be able to determine whether a piece of content was produced by a person or a machine, but they are often remarkably adept at recognising authenticity, expertise, lived experience, and genuine accountability when they encounter it. These qualities may become some of the most important differentiators available to organisations in the years ahead. In a world where content is abundant, trust in the institution behind the content may matter more than ever.

There is a certain irony in all of this. Many of the tools contributing to the proliferation of content are also proving useful in helping organisations navigate it.

Communications and public relations teams are using AI to adapt campaigns across different markets and cultural contexts with greater speed and precision; during live events like product launches and major announcements, audience sentiment can be analysed in real time, allowing messaging to evolve as conversations unfold; some organisations are using AI to run thousands of simulated crisis scenarios based on their operating environment, helping identify potential vulnerabilities and prepare response strategies before issues materialise; others are applying it to media engagement, analysing journalists’ reporting histories and areas of interest to develop more relevant and personalised outreach.

The same technologies are also beginning to redefine how organisations communicate directly with customers. At Absa, for example, the Abby virtual assistant helps clients access information, navigate products and services, and complete a range of banking activities through a chatbot platform. It is a demonstration of how AI is increasingly being deployed across the full spectrum of stakeholder engagement.

Those that benefit most from AI may not be those that automate everything, but those that understand which parts of communication should remain human. There is, however, a catch. Governance.

Surveys show that 59% of public relations practitioners expect AI and automation to grow in importance over the next five years, but at the same time, Africa has been found to have the lowest rate of governance-backed AI adoption at 24.8%, while only 20.5% of organisations report having responsible AI guidelines or policies in place.

There is an urgent need to invest in AI literacy and responsible AI training, ensuring employees engage with these tools critically and understand both their capabilities and limitations. Equally important is the development of clear governance mechanisms that guide how AI is used in practice, promoting greater accountability and transparency as these technologies become more deeply embedded in everyday communications activities.

At Absa, for example, the introduction of a Responsible Use of AI Policy has sought to establish clearer principles around transparency, human oversight and accountability, while complementary standards governing machine learning and AI models help guide how these technologies are developed and applied across the organisation.

The objective is not to constrain innovation, but to ensure that its adoption takes place within a framework that recognises both the opportunities and responsibilities that accompany it.

In many respects, that brings the profession full circle. For all the technological change communications has experienced over the past two decades, trust is the constant. The responsibility now is to ensure that it remains so.