Why We Created SITA à Genève
For the past three years, we have been running SITA à Genève, the Salon pour l’Innovation et la Transformation en Afrique. It is more than a conference. It is an answer. A response to a broken system that claims to fund development, yet rarely touches the soil where people live, work, and build.
My journey into the world of projects funding did not begin with ambition for power or influence—it began with a deep frustration. The gap between the enormous sums pledged for global development and the reality on the African ground was too wide to ignore. I had to act. That’s how Bafing Projects was born.
I knew it wouldn’t be easy. But nothing prepared me for the depth of the divide between the global financial ecosystem and the African entrepreneurial reality. These two worlds operate on completely different logics, each coherent in its own context, yet incompatible without translation.
On one side, financiers speak in risk ratios, return multiples, and ESG scores. On the other, African entrepreneurs speak in lived realities, unreliable electricity, informal markets, and human capital built by experience, not CVs.
There’s mutual distrust.
Misunderstandings.
And frankly, a dangerous amount of assumptions.
Too many decision-makers are unwilling to challenge their comfort zones. Too many project leaders lack the tools to articulate their value in global language. It’s not a fair war, but we must fight it anyway.
Still, in the midst of all this noise, I’ve met extraordinary people. Individuals and institutions that truly believe in a better world—and are willing to walk the talk. Investors who want their money to bring more than just profit. Leaders who understand that development is not charity; it is about creating dignity, opportunity, and shared value.
This is why SITA à Genève exists.
We needed a space to build bridges, a place where African solutions could be seen not as risky anomalies but as viable responses to pressing global issues. A place to redefine investment not as extraction, but as contribution. A place to show that Africa is not a crisis, it’s a crossroads.
But SITA is not just another summit or networking event. It’s an immersion into the soul of African business, the kind of business where value is collective, where nature is not a commodity but a member of the community, where profit comes from usefulness, not scarcity.
We bring you inside the heartbeat of transformation.
We connect capital to impact, and strategy to local intelligence.
We offer you a chance to do well by doing good, with your feet on the ground and your heart in the right place.
SITA à Genève is about bringing people with complementary goals together, to build something that is greater than any single interest: a future where Africa thrives on its own terms.
This is our 3rd edition, embark with us to prosperityland.
