On March 6, 1957, Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence from colonial rule. Nearly seven decades later, March 6 carries a different significance for Canada. On March 6, 2025, the Government of Canada launched its new Africa Strategy, framed as a blueprint for “shared prosperity and security” and a renewed era of engagement. The strategy and its goals are certainly laudable but in this period of increasing global instability, a much more concerted effort will be required if any significant results are to be achieved.
With one year behind us — and one year to go before Ghana marks the 70th anniversary of independence — this is an appropriate moment to reflect. What does meaningful partnership look like today? And what would it mean to ensure that, at minimum, our engagement does no harm?
Global Affairs Canada’s Africa Strategy outlines a set of early investments and initiatives focused on building long-term institutional, economic and development partnerships rather than short-term flagship projects. These include over $869 million in new international assistance and humanitarian programming across more than 50 projects, alongside a longer-term baseline of roughly $4.5 billion in bilateral assistance over five years supporting health, education and economic development. The strategy also commits to expanding Canada’s diplomatic footprint (including new embassies and special envoys), launching a pan-African trade hub and a new trade and development program, and establishing a FinDev Canada presence in South Africa to mobilize private investment. Additional targeted funding — such as $25.7 million for peace, security and stabilization initiatives and $54 million for governance and partnership-building projects — supports conflict prevention and institutional capacity. Taken together, these measures reflect a shift toward integrating trade, development finance, diplomacy and security into a more coordinated, partnership-based approach to Canada-Africa engagement.
These are positive shifts. For too long, Africa has been framed in Canadian policy primarily through the lenses of crisis response and humanitarian need. The new strategy attempts to reposition the continent as a strategic partner in a rapidly changing world. That rhetorical shift matters.
But rhetoric alone does not alter structural realities.
For decades, Canada and other countries in the Global North have launched strategies, action plans and partnership frameworks for Africa. Billions of dollars in development financing have flowed to the continent. Yet at the same time, resources continue to flow out. Critical minerals power global supply chains. Agricultural commodities fill international markets. Skilled professionals migrate into northern economies facing labour shortages. Increasingly, African data, linguistic diversity and digital labour underpin global artificial intelligence (AI) systems and platform economies.
The relationship remains profoundly unequal — and often extractive.
If Canada’s renewed engagement is to be credible, the starting point must be a principle familiar to medicine but insufficiently applied to international policy: do no harm.
In practice, that means acknowledging that development outcomes on the continent are shaped not only by domestic governance challenges but also by the global political economy. Climate change, driven disproportionately by historical emissions from industrialized economies, undermines agricultural productivity and fuels displacement and insecurity. Volatile commodity markets expose African economies to external shocks. Debt burdens constrain fiscal space. Digital markets are dominated by foreign firms that extract value while limiting local capture.
To speak of “shared prosperity” without confronting these asymmetries risks reproducing the very dynamics the strategy seeks to transcend.
A New Framework of Understanding
A do-no-harm approach would begin by recognizing that Canadian commercial and strategic interests do not automatically align with African development priorities. Expanding critical mineral partnerships, for example, must not replicate earlier cycles of resource extraction that externalize environmental and social costs. Digital partnerships must avoid reinforcing dependencies in cloud infrastructure, data governance or AI procurement. Security cooperation must be attentive to local political contexts and avoid entrenching coercive institutions at the expense of accountability.
This is particularly urgent in the digital domain — a central pillar of Africa’s transformation and a growing focus of Canadian engagement. Digital infrastructure, digital public services, AI governance and cybersecurity cooperation all hold promise. But without attention to data sovereignty, competition policy, taxation and local capacity building, digital transformation can deepen dependency rather than reduce it.
A strategy anchored in do no harm would also require humility about knowledge production. For too long, African contexts have been treated as sites of policy experimentation or implementation, rather than as sources of normative and institutional innovation. From data protection regimes to regional digital market integration efforts, African institutions are actively shaping governance models that deserve serious engagement — not passive diffusion.
There is also a narrative dimension. Canada, like many northern states, continues to view Africa through a narrow prism: conflict-ridden, aid-dependent and peripheral to core strategic interests. These perceptions shape policy design as much as budget allocations do. If Africa is seen primarily as a site of instability or charity, strategies will reflect containment and assistance. If it is recognized as central to global supply chains, demographic growth, climate futures and digital governance, then partnership becomes both a moral and strategic imperative.
The coming year offers an opportunity. As Ghana approaches 70 years of independence, the symbolism is powerful. Independence was not simply a political milestone; it was a claim to agency and self-determination within an unequal international system. That claim remains unfinished.
For Canada, marking one year of its Africa Strategy should not be a moment of self-congratulation but of recalibration. The measure of success will not be the number of memoranda signed or trade missions conducted. It will be whether Canadian engagement meaningfully contributes to reducing structural inequalities rather than reinforcing them.
Do no harm is not a ceiling; it must be a floor. It demands coherence between climate policy and development commitments, between trade policy and labour mobility, and between digital partnerships and data governance. It requires confronting how extractive logics — economic, digital and environmental — persist within contemporary global capitalism.
If the next year of Canada’s Africa Strategy can move from rhetorical partnership toward structural fairness, it will honour not only its own stated ambitions but also the longer arc of independence that March 6 represents.
There is much work to do.
