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French President Emmanuel Macron has announced $27 billion in new investments in Africa during the two-day summit hosted in Kenya.

Getting into it: Macron made the announcement at the opening of the Africa Forward Summit Monday in Nairobi, with the total of $27 billion broken down into $16 billion from French private and public funds and about $10 billion from African companies, all aimed at energy transition, agriculture, artificial intelligence, digital infrastructure, and the maritime economy. Macron put the job creation figure at 250,000, split between the two continents.

The summit is France’s first held in an English-speaking African country and marks a deliberate pivot away from the country’s traditional strongholds in West and Central Africa, where French military and political influence has collapsed over the past three years after junta leaders in Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger expelled French troops and turned to Russia for security assistance.

Speaking at the summit, Macron said “We are not simply here to come and invest on the African continent alongside you – we need great African business leaders to come and invest in France. And that too is what underpins this relationship, now entirely free of hang-ups.”

More than 30 African heads of state attended, including leaders from Senegal, Ivory Coast, Guinea, and Chad, along with Nigerian billionaire Aliko Dangote, the wealthiest person on the continent, and executives from major French firms such as TotalEnergies and Orange.

Macron also took a direct shot at France’s old approach to Africa. He said, “This is a continent that I no longer want France to view as a private preserve, where business leaders supposedly have all the rights or guaranteed contracts simply because it’s Francophone Africa.” He also defended the French military pullout from the Sahel, saying it “wasn’t a humiliation but a logical response to a given situation.” Macron added, “When our presence was no longer wanted after the coups, we left. I’m convinced that we must let these states and their leaders, even putschists, chart their own course.”

In an interview with Paris-based magazine The Africa Report before the summit, Macron pushed back on the idea that colonialism is still the root cause of every problem on the continent, saying “we must not exonerate from all responsibility the seven decades that followed independence” and pressing African leaders to clean up governance on their end. Separately, Macron weighed in on the return of African art taken during the colonial era, calling the momentum behind it “unstoppable.” That comment landed days after French lawmakers approved legislation clearing the path for Paris to hand back looted cultural pieces.