Afrotopia in Zurich: Between Vision and Implementation
- Tallulah Patricia B
- Oct 19
- 7 min read
Updated: Oct 20
By Tallulah Patricia Bär
With Special Thanks to Sarah Winkler and Chris Thomas for inviting me to moderate this insightful event.
When the philosopher and economist Felwine Sarr first introduced the concept of Afrotopia, he invited readers to imagine Africa as a site of creation, not correction. A place where prosperity is measured through culture, connection, and care rather than growth statistics like GDP.
That same invitation echoed in Zurich last week at the GreenBuzz event “Afrotopia? Visions of a Sustainable Future.”
It was not an academic seminar, nor a corporate showcase, but something in between: a dialogue between entrepreneurs, financiers, policymakers, and diaspora leaders about what it really takes to build self-determined futures.
I moderated the evening, balancing the roles of bridge, listener, and provocateur. My goal was to hold a space where each participant could move beyond rhetoric, and to question what Afrotopia means when translated into investment portfolios, funding models, or export contracts.
First Speaker: Elizabeth Iember Muehlich – Regeneration in Practice
Elizabeth Muehlich, Managing Partner of Beyond Fair Organics, began not with abstractions but with data. Her team has increased farmers’ net income in northern Rwanda by over 40 percent within five years by shifting from commodity exports to local value addition.
Coffee is processed, roasted, and packaged domestically.
Biochar from crop residue is used to restore soil carbon.
Revenue from by-products funds community micro-grants for women-led agri-start-ups.
“If you export green beans and import roasted ones, you’re exporting jobs and importing dependency,” she said.
Her model is financed through a blend of impact loans and cooperative ownership shares, ensuring that farmers are not employees but shareholders.This tangible example of Afrotopia — value retention at origin — set the tone for the night.
Yet Muehlich also acknowledged limits: Rwanda’s logistics and certification costs remain high, and access to patient capital is scarce.Her ask to the audience was clear:
“Don’t just buy fair-trade coffee. Invest in fair-process infrastructure.”
Implementation, in her view, depends on changing investor time horizons; moving from 12-month ROI cycles to seven-year regeneration cycles that mirror nature’s pace.
Second Speaker: Peter Beez – Redefining the Role of the State
Dr. Peter Beez, Senior Policy Advisor at the Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC), spoke next. He described how the SDC is piloting “Outcome-Based Blended Finance” mechanisms that reward verified social results rather than project inputs.
A current pilot in Mozambique’s water sector, for instance, ties repayments to the number of households receiving safe water for at least two consecutive years. The structure is being adapted for African renewable-energy access schemes in 2026.
“If public funds can absorb the first loss,” he said, “private investors will engage where they otherwise wouldn’t.”
Beez’s message was pragmatic: development budgets are shrinking, so public capital must act as leverage, not lifeline. However, he cautioned against a blind faith in financial engineering.
“When we turn empathy into a metric, we risk losing the human story behind it.”
The discussion turned briefly to the Swiss corporate ecosystem, where sustainability is often outsourced to CSR divisions rather than integrated into product design. Beez suggested that “true cooperation starts when sustainability departments make themselves obsolete.”
Speaker Three: Roger Müller – The Discipline and Dilemma of Impact Investing
From the investment side, Roger Müller, Co-Founder of Enabling Qapital AG, offered numbers and nuance. His firm manages over USD 700 million in impact assets, investing in microfinance, clean energy, and inclusive fintech across 50 emerging markets.
He illustrated how microfinance institutions have evolved from credit outlets into financial-literacy platforms:
“A good loan is not one that is repaid; it’s one that leads to independence.”
Still, he was candid about contradictions. Interest rates in certain rural markets remain above 20 percent due to operational costs. Carbon-credit income — now a major revenue stabilizer — introduces volatility tied to European policy cycles.
Müller called for pan-African capital markets to reduce dependency on European intermediaries:
“Every time a Swiss fund invests in an African fund that invests in a local fund, 5 percent of potential impact is lost to friction.”
His appeal for regulatory harmonization across African regions echoed Sarr’s notion that sovereignty begins with coordination.Implementation, he said, requires not more aid, but more cross-border financial architecture designed in Africa.
Fourth Speaker: Contimi Kenfack Mouafo – The Power of Student Innovation
Contimi Kenfack Mouafo, Founder of 3 E’s 4 Africa, grounded the conversation in education and agency. His non-profit links African and European universities through student innovation challenges in sustainable engineering.
He presented tangible outcomes:
A Cameroonian team converting cassava waste into biodegradable plastic bags.
A Ghanaian university developing IoT-enabled biogas digesters.
A Nigerian research group using AI to forecast methane capture efficiency.
Kenfack emphasized that each project operates with local mentors and open-source documentation so knowledge remains public.
“We’re not scaling startups; we’re scaling confidence,” he said.
The audience responded strongly to his critique of “helicopter partnerships” — short-term collaborations that vanish after pilot funding.
“Partnerships that end at the photo opportunity,” he noted, “teach dependency disguised as exposure.”
His challenge to Swiss institutions was direct: create reciprocal fellowships — where African students come to Switzerland, and Swiss students are required to complete field residencies under African supervision. That single policy, he argued, would do more to decolonize cooperation than a decade of panel discussions.
Questions on Technology, Bias, and Ownership
In the open discussion, the topic of artificial intelligence emerged naturally. The speakers explored how data platforms can empower African SMEs, for example, predicting crop yields or verifying ESG metrics for exporters.
But both Kenfack and Muehlich warned that technological sovereignty is still fragile. Most African firms rely on cloud infrastructure hosted in Europe or the US. This means that local innovation often comes with data dependency baked in (assessment via perplexity here)
Kenfack proposed creating regional AI labs linked to agricultural universities, funded through blended models combining public research grants with private agricultural buyers. Such labs, he argued, could train algorithms in African contexts before they train Africans how to adapt. The audience questioned feasibility. Beez responded pragmatically by arguing that Regional AI governance will only emerge once the AU sets data-standard guidelines. But private actors could start pilots now.
A key takeaway was that Afrotopia’s digital dimension must be planned intentionally: technology as partnership, not proxy.
On Friction and Hope in the Room
As moderator, I sensed a shift throughout the evening. From curiosity to accountability. Participants moved from asking “How can we help?” to “Where are we complicit?”
Constructive disagreements surfaced:
Should Swiss development funds favor African-led intermediaries even if audit processes are slower?
Can microfinance institutions be truly empowering if they depend on European carbon markets?
How can we measure regenerative outcomes without commodifying them?
No one pretended to have final answers. But the discussion revealed a shared conviction: the next era of cooperation must be co-authored, not subcontracted.
Practical Implementation Pathways Identified
From these exchanges, several implementation pathways crystallized:
Finance: Develop a Swiss-African Impact Guarantee Facility that backs African-managed funds directly rather than through European intermediaries.
Trade: Support value-addition infrastructure in agriculture and fashion through public–private export guarantees focused on processing at origin.
Education: Establish reciprocal innovation fellowships where European and African students co-design climate solutions under joint supervision.
Technology: Create regional AI labs with open-data policies anchored in African universities.
Measurement: Move from GDP-centric indicators toward “Quality-of-Life Accounts” combining ecological, cultural, and relational metrics.
Each idea links philosophy to policy — Afrotopia made tangible through finance, trade, and governance innovation.
Personal Critical Reflections
While the event’s energy was constructive, a few systemic contradictions remained visible:
Narrative asymmetry: Even in progressive spaces, African expertise is often validated only after being endorsed by European institutions.
Short funding cycles: Most impact funds remain tied to three-year mandates, incompatible with regenerative business models.
Token representation: Panels increasingly include African founders, but decision-making boards rarely do.
Addressing these gaps requires more than goodwill; it demands institutional redesign (why and how; more here). Without structural change, even the most eloquent dialogues risk becoming performative empathy.
As one participant quietly remarked after the session, “Switzerland loves Africa as a topic — not yet as a peer.” That comment was uncomfortable, but necessary.
Looking Forward and Looking Ahead: ETH Zurich and the Broader Conversation
Next week, on 22 October 2025, Professor Felwine Sarr will speak at ETH Zurich, hosted by NADEL – Global Cooperation and Sustainable Development (more details here). His presence might well expand the conversation from practice to principle: how to align academic research, financial systems, and cultural imagination.
If GreenBuzz captured the how, Sarr will challenge the why. He is expected to address post-aid paradigms, the restitution of knowledge, and how epistemic justice underpins economic justice.
The timing feels deliberate — Zurich’s financial sector and academic community rarely share the same audience. Afrotopia has managed to bridge that gap, at least for a moment.
Closing Thoughts
Moderating this event was not about managing flow; it was about tracing patterns of power and possibility. My own journey, from studying international relations and African Political Economy and Development, to working in finance and philanthropy has taught me that systems change only when language changes first.
That evening, I felt that language shifted. Aid became leverage. And Investment became partnership. And partnership, finally, began to sound like reciprocity.
Yet ideals remain fragile unless operationalized. The task now is to embed these insights into procurement criteria, funding structures, and board agendas, where Afrotopia stops being a metaphor and starts shaping budgets.
Because ultimately, Afrotopia is not an African dream. It is a global necessity. An economy of dignity in an age that too often mistakes growth for progress.
As Sarr writes, “To imagine is to repair.”
The repair has begun — one conversation, one policy, one partnership at a time.
The evening closed with plant-based Afro-fusion dishes by Anthony Bello’s Spicy Roots. Simple yet savoury. Sensory, and full of quiet symbolism — alongside Tawanda’s ZimKaffee wine, whose rich aroma filled the space with something that felt like memory and renewal at once.
Food, like philosophy, has its own language of exchange. It reminded us that cooperation is not only negotiated in contracts or conferences. Sometimes, it begins with a shared meal and the willingness to imagine differently.
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