Kigali, Rwanda  – At the International Security Conference on Africa, President Paul Kagame urged African nations to move beyond dependence and take full responsibility for their own security.

With over 1,000 participants including security experts, diplomats, policymakers and analysts from across the continent and beyond, the conference is taking place in Kigali, Rwanda, from May 19 to 21.

“What begins here is more than a conference,” Kagame told delegates. “It is a deliberate effort to change both the narrative and the substance of how Africa engages with global security debates.”

He challenged the continent’s leaders to stop outsourcing peace and security, a pattern that has long allowed external actors to dominate the agenda.

Kagame argued that this approach has failed, weakening Africa’s voice and creating solutions that rarely fit the continent’s realities.

He proposed a shift focused on three key areas: ownership, governance, and cooperation, with ownership defined as the ability to handle threats independently without relying on outside intervention.

Governance must deliver dignity, opportunity, and stability for citizens. And cooperation requires serious, long-term partnerships rooted in shared responsibility, not crisis-driven coordination.

“No country today can secure itself in isolation,” Kagame said. “But cooperation must go beyond merely sharing information… it must be strategic, intentional, and innovative.”

The event’s exhibition showed what that future could look like. Defense tools, technologies, and systems developed within Africa were on display, a quiet but powerful statement that solutions exist here and can be scaled.

“The exhibition attached to this conference shows what is possible, when we invest in ourselves. Where we have capacity, we must scale it up. Where we lack it, this is the time and the place to build it and also cooperate,” he said.