unDavos Summit

The African diaspora sends €54 billion to the continent every year — representing 10% of Senegal’s GDP alone — yet most of it is consumed rather than invested. A gender-lens fund is building a pathway to a billion-dollar carbon-market-linked fund. A pineapple farmer in Uganda is turning agricultural waste into vegan leather. This panel explores what it really takes to mobilize private, public, and...

Only 3.8% of global climate research funding targets Africa — the continent most affected by climate change. Of that sliver, just 14% of the research happens on the continent itself. Meanwhile, only 2% of venture capital goes to all-female founder teams, and the stats have actually gotten worse despite years of panels about fixing it. This panel brings together the African Union Commission, a rene...

In the last eight years, Sedanic Group grew from one person with no office to a $10 million management consulting firm operating across 12 countries with 200 professionals. Its founder made a deliberate choice: leave a comfortable life in Russia and return to Nigeria to build. This keynote-style address makes the case that Africa’s future must be built by Africans working with the world — not wait...

Before colonization, sub-Saharan Africa had no prisons. In 2022, the continent sequestered over 40 billion tons of CO2 — worth 3.6 trillion euros at EU carbon prices — yet none of that value is reflected in any GDP. This panel of diaspora entrepreneurs building biofuels in Ghana, investment platforms in West Africa, and electric fleets in Kenya explores what it means to build Africa from seven gen...

The average lifetime of a corporate venture capital unit is 3.7 years. If you survive three CEO changes, you have a shot at longevity. This panel brings together CVC leaders from Swiss Post, Jung Heinrich, and Worley to debate why corporate venture capital is more strategic than pure VC — and why Europe urgently needs multi-corporate funds that pool risk across sectors. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS Why...

90% of AI models and algorithms inside organizations are unknown to the organization itself. When infrastructure goes down in an agentic world, you don’t just lose connectivity — you lose context, while autonomous agents may already be mid-conversation with other systems. This panel brings together cybersecurity veterans, AI governance experts, and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur to debate digital i...

The average age of board members at the top 500 companies is 64. Only 30% feel confident bringing ESG and sustainability into strategy. And an AI proposal that boosts margins by 20% while eliminating 40% of jobs just landed on the boardroom table. This panel of active board directors debates what it actually takes to govern in 2026. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS Why boards should spend 50% of their time...

82% of the next generation entering the workforce said they would prefer an AI boss — because it would be fairer, less political, and let them work from home. Meanwhile, LLMs are trained on only 15% of the world’s information because only 15% is digitized. This panel brings together board members, startup founders, and a neuroscientist to wrestle with what leadership actually means when geopolitic...

Professional services firms are billing clients for hours while privately using AI to slash those same hours — and nobody is talking about it. This panel pulls back the curtain on how consulting and legal firms are actually adopting AI, why junior consultants are bypassing corporate systems to use ChatGPT on their phones, and what that means for confidentiality, talent development, and the future...

99% of all AI today is black-boxed — you don’t know how results are generated. Meanwhile, a startup called Cognifiber is turning optical fibers into processors that could accelerate AI inference by 1,000x while cutting power consumption by 8,000x. This panel brings together an AI prediction company, a photonic computing startup, a data interoperability firm, and Microsoft to debate how AI is rewir...

More than 50% of global GDP depends on nature, yet it is still treated as an externality. A new generation of AI-powered earth observation tools can now answer the question “how many tin roofs are in California?” in seconds — and it costs almost nothing to query the same data again. This panel explores how satellite imagery, ground-truth sensors, and Islamic endowment finance are converging to mak...

Sun King went from scraping by for a decade to powering 50 million people with off-grid solar across 11 countries — backed by the largest local-currency securitization in Sub-Saharan African history. Rwanda scaled from 20 donor-funded clinics to over 350 self-sustaining, nurse-operated healthcare posts in under five years. This panel asks: how do you build the ecosystem that makes that kind of sca...

The traditional funding models for global health are gone. USAID shutdowns, WHO funding exits, tariff pressures, and development agency withdrawals have reshaped the landscape in a single year. Yet the next pandemic is coming — we just do not know when. From malaria bed nets in Nigeria to surgical AI in 4,000 operating rooms, the question is no longer whether to invest in health, but how to do it...

The Ebola vaccine is a remarkable product — a single dose that immunizes rapidly and safely. But it is expensive, requires extreme cold chain storage, and is manufactured on a process that does not scale easily. CEPI is investing up to $30 million to change that, partnering with Hilleman Laboratories, Merck, and SK Bioscience in a pioneering new model for public-private partnership. WHAT THIS PANE...

1.5 billion mosquito nets distributed. 1.2 billion malaria cases averted. 72% of that impact from a single humble tool. Yet 200 million of the 220 million bed nets used annually in Africa are still imported from Asia. If malaria were eliminated, it would unlock $4 trillion in GDP on the African continent. Health innovation is not just saving lives — it is an economic engine. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS...

Healthcare costs will continue to grow — nobody should think a country spending 15% of GDP on health today can drop to 12%. The question is how to contain that growth smartly. Meanwhile, in France alone, sick leave costs have risen 55% over the past decade to over €20 billion per year. Investing in health is not a cost center — it is a return on investment that most governments have not yet learne...

Fertility decline and population aging are usually discussed as abstract demographic curves. But in the exam room, a woman undergoing IVF is often treated as a data point rather than a person. Meanwhile, AI can now outperform embryologists at selecting viable embryos — yet the most human moments in healthcare remain stubbornly undertouched by technology. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS Why fertility and lo...

Health systems were built on a paternalistic model: get sick, come to the hospital, we look after you, off you go. But patients are already using ChatGPT for health advice without their doctors' permission. In China, primary care physicians are essentially on-call 24/7 via WeChat. And the gap between care demand and provider supply is not shrinking — it is widening everywhere. WHAT THIS PANEL...

Philips is now at 68% agentic code generation in its software division. Clinical trials are delayed by an average of 10-12 months. And one startup has 2.4 million users and 11 million health conversations across five countries — all on WhatsApp. The convergence of AI and life sciences is not hypothetical. It is already reshaping how drugs are developed, how patients are reached, and how decisions...

3.3 billion people play video games worldwide. Parents searching online for information about gaming are five times more likely to find a negative headline than a positive one. But the research tells a different story: games are driving education, mental health support, climate action, and human connection at a scale no other medium can match. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS How the pandemic revealed gamin...

Productivity studies show that remote workers actually produce 10-15% less output when measured objectively — not by self-reporting, but by tangible metrics like software shipped and bugs resolved. Yet most headlines say the opposite. Welcome to Work 4.0, where the myths are louder than the data. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS Why Work 4.0 — the era of human augmentation with AI — demands a shift from sta...

70% of skills in most jobs will change in the next four years. Students using AI for essays are showing short-term memory loss and cognitive decline. And one university found that 80% of incoming students had never had a conversation with a stranger. Education is not just evolving — it is facing an existential reckoning. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS Why AI literacy, critical thinking, and lifelong learn...

A 60-second TikTok can teach you macroeconomics. A podcast can move markets. A single creator with a phone can outperform an entire studio. Meanwhile, cinema attendance in Europe is resurging — not for the screen, but for the collective experience of being in a room together. WHAT THIS PANEL COVERS Why the pendulum is swinging back toward communal viewing experiences even as individual content con...

Investment in space is at an all-time high, yet it is not distributed equally — communications and infrastructure absorb the bulk while Earth observation and data services that could save lives remain underfunded. The Maldives Space Research Organisation launched a $50 million fund for island nations, yet its government cannot yet defend putting space in the national budget. This is the capital pa...

We are living in the golden age of fraud. Illicit crypto transactions surged to an estimated $154 billion last year — a 160% increase — while AI-enabled scams prove 4.5x more effective than traditional ones. Impersonation scams alone exploded by 1,400% in value stolen, and if global e-crime damages were an economy, it would be the third largest in the world after the US and China at $9.5 trillion....