A curated, trust-led gathering later this month, will bring together African Diaspora professionals, investors, and community leaders to tackle the critical question of how Diaspora wealth can be channelled safely into lasting development across the continent.
The inaugural Africa Infrastructure Roundtable (AIR) will take place on Friday, 24 April 2025 at Seesaw Space in Manchester.
Organised by Langovest - a company whose mission centres on connecting Diaspora capital, insight, and commitment to long-term African infrastructure development - the Roundtable represents a deliberate departure from large-scale conferences. Its format is more seminar than summit: intimate, discussion-focused, and designed to create genuine space for nuance, disagreement, and depth.
The scale of Diaspora remittances is striking. The Nigerian Diaspora alone sends over $20 billion back home every year. Yet, for all the financial commitment that figure represents, the organisers are candid about where most of those funds actually go: "Most of that money is strictly funding day-to-day survival for relatives."
The future of Infrastructure development in Africa
When Diaspora members do attempt to invest in projects back home - building properties, funding businesses, or contributing to community infrastructure - they frequently encounter a system that is not ready to receive them well. Family members mismanaging funds, fraudulent projects, and outright scams have left many would-be investors burnt and reluctant. Trust, the organisers argue, has broken down - and that breakdown is the fundamental obstacle to unlocking Diaspora capital for development.
Africa Infrastructure Roundtable 3
It is this trust deficit - rather than a lack of money or ambition - that the Roundtable is designed to address. Before capital can move responsibly, the organisers believe, conversations must first mature. The event is explicitly framed as an exercise in building what they call "human infrastructure": trust, shared understanding, and coordinated thinking among people who are invested in Africa's future.
For Diaspora professionals who have long wanted to contribute more meaningfully to Africa's future - but have been held back by broken systems, eroded trust, or simply not knowing where to start - the Roundtable offers something rare: a credible, intimate, and genuinely useful space to think, connect, and begin to act.