About Lazarus Chakwera
At the APO 2026 summit in Brussels, President Lazarus Chakwera delivered a presidential address calling for Africa to shift from aid dependency to sovereign agency. He described three forces for the continent's future: resilience, strategic alliances, and investment in production over humanitarian programs. Chakwera criticized what he termed a "new geopolitical attitude" in Western democracies that seeks to destroy alliances, likening it to "an old spirit of King Leopold trying to make a comeback," and argued that such isolationism is "doomed to fail" because the world is irreversibly interconnected.
Chakwera stated that African nations must prioritize their own investments in areas such as modern transport infrastructure, state institutional capacity, economic zones, and digital technologies, saying "it is not acceptable for a parent to claim that they value the education of their children and go around asking other people for school fees" while spending on other items. He noted that he and other heads of state had negotiated a change in the African Union-European Union relationship from a donor-recipient model to a "partnership of equals," embodied in the Global Gateway package. He also pointed to unfinished continental integration, including open borders and a common payment system for the African Continental Free Trade Area.
Source: AI-verified profile updated from Lazarus Chakwera's recent appearances.
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✨ AI-enhanced transcript with speaker attribution
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Lazarus Chakwera0:11
As President of Malawi, I represent the only global champion from least developed countries in this meeting. This means that as far as progress on SDG 7's target of universal access to clean cooking by 2030 is concerned, we as a global community still have a long way to go. As a global community, we are not on track with targets for clean cooking fuels. We are not on track with targets for clean cooking technologies. And with 2.8 billion people lacking access to clean cooking services as of 2019, we are certainly not on track with achieving net zero emissions by 2050. We still have too many, like Kines Yusoya, a mother of three here in Malawi, who live in conditions that force them to rely on burning firewood and charcoal for fuel to survive. We still have too many cooking over open fires and rudimentary stoves despite knowing and seeing the environmental impact and forest degradation this causes around them. And with populations in LDCs growing faster than clean fuel adoption, we must pick the pace considerably. Even with urbanization trends, for at least a decade, a couple of billion people worldwide will continue to rely on burning biomass for their cooking needs. And electricity alone won't fill this gap and won't reach Kinesi's house. This is an urgent matter for all of us. And so we have made it an urgent matter for Malawi. We have chosen to promote cleaner biomass cook stoves as a solution through our Energy Compact, because these solutions save two tons of carbon dioxide per household each year. We have chosen to disseminate clean cook stoves en masse and have so far reached our goal of 2 million by 2020. We have chosen to transition our population to clean cooking to achieve net zero emissions by 2050. I say that none of this was luck or an accident; it was a choice we made. And it is a choice we must keep making every day. I only wish it was enough, but it isn't. Like a relay racing team, the advances made by a country like mine only count if the rest of the world chooses clean technology too. This is why I will be going into COP 26 with a pledge: a pledge to call on other nations to choose and transition to clean cooking by 2030. I pledge to call on other nations to make this a decade of action for energy for all. I pledge to call on other nations to provide access to clean cooking solutions now. If we as a global community do not meet this challenge together, we will be undone by it altogether. The preservation of our natural resources depends on it. The protection of our forests depends on it. The health and livelihood of our people depend on it. The survival of our civilization depends on it. We cannot afford to fail. Thank you for your attention.
