Africa’s Tech Festival 2025 Kicks Off in Cape Town: “Where African Technology Meets the World”
Cape Town, South Africa. The Africa Tech Festival 2025 — the continent’s flagship gathering of telecoms, enterprise tech, AI and startup communities — officially kicked off Tuesday 11th.November 2025 at the Cape Town International Convention Centre (CTICC), bringing together thousands of delegates, ministers, investors and founders for three days of panels, product launches and networking. The festival’s anchor programmes — AfricaCom, AfricaTech, AfricaIgnite and The AI Summit Cape Town — run across the week and aim to accelerate investment, connectivity and responsible innovation across Africa.
A big-stage return to Cape Town
Organizers say the 2025 edition is expected to host over 14,000 attendees, more than 300 speakers and upward of 200 exhibitors — an ecosystem mix of telcos, cloud and data-centre players, enterprise software vendors, investors and scaleups — all drawn to Cape Town by the city’s growing status as a tech hub. The festival’s public programme runs from 11–13 November, while VIP and partner events began earlier, on 10 November.
Themes and priorities: investment, inclusion and infrastructure
This year’s festival is framed around four cross-cutting priorities highlighted by the organizers and partners: Responsible Innovation, Inclusive Investment, Connectivity for Development, and Policy Harmonisation. Sessions on the main stages will tackle pressing topics including the rollout of resilient digital infrastructure, cloud and data-centre strategy, regulation and cross-border data flows, and the mainstreaming of generative AI for African industry.
Who’s on stage
The official programme features a mix of global and African voices. Confirmed speakers include senior industry and policy figures such as Solly Malatsi (South Africa’s Minister of Communications and Digital Technologies), Strive Masiyiwa (founder and chairman of Cassava Technologies), senior executives from Microsoft Africa and MTN, and representatives from OpenAI among others. The festival also lists a broad lineup of sector experts across cybersecurity, fintech, cloud, and green ICT.
Notable additions announced in the run-up include regional founders and startup ecosystem leaders — a reminder that AfricaTech’s programming intentionally pairs high-level policymaker discussions with investor rounds, startup demo stages and talent days that spotlight early stage innovators.
Day-one snapshot: panels, pavilion buzz and AFEST networking
Day one opened with keynote panels on strengthening Africa’s digital backbone and the investor view on scaling African startups. The exhibition halls filled quickly with telco booths, cloud providers and data-centre vendors demonstrating solutions for latency, resilience and local cloud sovereignty. Outside the formal sessions, the festival’s AFEST networking evening — a signature social event — is scheduled for tonight at the Grand Africa Café & Beach and is expected to draw hundreds of delegates and international visitors. (Program details and schedule are available on the festival site.)
From pressrooms to pitch decks: who’s making news here
Press releases and partner bulletins arriving at the venue highlighted both corporate announcements and startup milestones. For example, PR Newswire reported that UrbanGeekz CEO Kunbi Tinuoye will be speaking at the festival — one of several regional founder appearances that organizers say are intended to strengthen investor–founder matchmaking during the three-day programme.
APO Group and other communications partners have also underscored the festival’s role in elevating Africa’s innovation stories to global audiences, noting participation across thought-leadership stages and the Leaders In Africa summit for senior delegates.
Why it matters
Africa Tech Festival has grown into a crossroads where policy, capital and product meet. For telcos and infrastructure providers, the focus is on financing and building resilient networks and data centres; for enterprises the conversation is about cloud adoption and productivity gains; for startups and investors it’s about more disciplined scale and cross-border expansion. Taken together, the festival is both a temperature check on the continent’s digital transformation and a market-making moment for deals and partnerships.
What to watch this week
Watch for announcements on:
major investment rounds or corporate venture deals supporting pan-African scaleups;
partnerships to expand data-centre and cloud capacity on the continent;
AI adoption frameworks and responsible AI commitments from large enterprises and platform providers;
policy signals from government delegations that could influence cross-border data and regulatory harmonization.
