The Eighth Summit Will Be the Third
Paragraph 19 committed the African Union and CARICOM to a summit every 7 September. Today is 7 September. The next summit is in 2028.
Today is Africa-CARICOM Day, five years to the day since the first Africa-CARICOM Summit was convened virtually on 7 September 2021. There is no summit today, and there will not be one.
That is not an oversight, and it is not a story about a meeting that slipped. It is a published decision that appears to have been noticed by almost nobody outside the process, and it says something more interesting about this partnership than a missed date would.
What was committed
The Final Communiqué of the first summit is explicit. Paragraph 19 records that the Heads of State and Government:
“Further committed to institutionalize cooperation between Africa and CARICOM and the diaspora by designating September 7th of every year as Africa-CARICOM Day, setting up a dedicated Secretariat/Structure and holding annual Africa-CARICOM Summits on September 7th, and called on Member States to support this initiative.”
Annual. Not periodic, not biennial, not “as circumstances permit.” The commitment was to meet every year on a fixed date, and the fixed date was chosen precisely so that the schedule would require no further negotiation.
What has happened
The second summit was convened in Addis Ababa on 6 and 7 September 2025, four years after the first, under the theme of reparatory justice. It adopted the Addis Ababa Declaration on Reparatory Justice and a communiqué of its own.
That communiqué set the next date. The African Union Assembly — the organisation’s supreme organ — endorsed it at the 39th AU Summit in Addis Ababa on 15 February 2026. Decision Assembly/AU/Dec.942(XXXIX), at paragraph 13, “ENDORSES the annexed communiqué adopted by the Summit in which Heads of State and Government called for the third Africa-CARICOM Summit to be held on 7th September 2028.” Hosting is to alternate between the two regions, and the third summit falls to a CARICOM member state.
So the position today is not ambiguous and not hidden. It is decided, minuted, and published on the African Union’s own website. What has not happened is any amendment to paragraph 19. The annual commitment has not been revised, replaced or withdrawn. It has simply been overtaken by a practice that does not match it, and the gap between the two has never been acknowledged in either direction.
The pattern is older than the summit schedule
Paragraph 20 of the same communiqué directed the two secretariats to begin institutionalising the partnership within six months, and to facilitate adoption of the governance constitutive statutes at “the 2nd Summit in 2022.” The second summit took place in 2025. Whether those statutes were adopted there is a question this site has put to both secretariats in writing and cannot yet answer.
The same paragraph urged the two chief executives to conclude a Memorandum of Understanding for possible signature at UNCTAD XV in Barbados in October 2021. It was signed in the margins of the 79th session of the United Nations General Assembly in September 2024, by CARICOM Secretary-General Carla Barnett and African Union Deputy Chairperson Monique Nsanzabaganwa — three years after the occasion the communiqué named.
Three commitments, three timetables, three overruns of roughly three years each. That consistency is the finding. It suggests a partnership whose difficulty is not political will, which is abundant and repeatedly restated, but the machinery for converting agreement into scheduled, owned, dated action.
What has actually been delivered
An honest record has to run in both directions, and the last twelve months contain real institutional progress.
On 17 June 2026, the African Union and CARICOM reparations mechanisms held their first joint meeting. They agreed a working cadence — quarterly bureau meetings and at least one annual plenary — which is precisely the kind of specificity absent from most of the 2021 text. A mechanism that meets on a schedule it set itself is a different object from a mechanism that exists on paper.
Decision 942 also directs the establishment of an African Union representational office in Georgetown, Guyana, and a CARICOM office in Addis Ababa. That is the institutionalisation paragraph 20 required within six months, arriving five years late — but arriving, and in a form concrete enough to verify.
It is worth being clear about what this means. The reparations track is moving. The summit track is not. Where this partnership has attached a named body, a fixed cadence and an identifiable owner to a commitment, it has delivered. Where it has attached a date to an aspiration, it has not.
What to watch
Three things would change the assessment on this page, and each is checkable.
An amendment, or an acknowledgement. If the annual commitment in paragraph 19 is no longer operative, the straightforward course is to say so. A partnership that revises its own schedule openly is in better health than one carrying a commitment nobody intends to meet.
Evidence on the governance statutes. Whether the constitutive statutes were adopted at the second summit is the single most consequential open question in this record, because those statutes are what would give the partnership a standing structure rather than a series of occasions.
Something to observe on 7 September. CARICOM’s own Africa-CARICOM Day archive has published nothing since 8 September 2024. A day designated in the founding text as the fixed point of the relationship has, for two years, passed without a public marker from one of its two parties.
The next scheduled opportunity is 7 September 2028. On the commitment as written, it will be the eighth. It will be the third.
A note on sources
The AU Assembly decision cited here is published on the African Union’s website. The 2025 summit outcome documents and the February 2026 Assembly decisions are likewise on the public record.
The 2021 Final Communiqué is a different matter. This site has been unable to locate an official copy hosted on either an African Union or a CARICOM domain, and the text quoted above is taken from a third-party mirror. Written requests for an official copy were sent to the CARICOM Secretariat on 26 August 2026 and to the African Union Commission on 26 August, 27 August and 1 September 2026, the first two of which were returned undelivered by the receiving server. No reply has been received from either secretariat. That a foundational document of this partnership is not readily available from either party to it is, in a small way, part of the same story.
This site maintains a running tracker of Africa–CARICOM commitments and their delivery status. Sources for this piece are listed in Resources. Corrections are welcome and are recorded rather than made silently. Nothing here is investment advice.