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AFRICAN DEVELOPMENT SPECIAL / Consultant: TICAD 9 Offers a Wealth of Opportunities for Japanese Companies; Firms Should Seize These Chances to Expand into New Fields, Create New Businesses

Courtesy of Yukari Umemoto
Yukari Umemoto

The Yomiuri Shimbun

17:17 JST, August 20, 2025

Yukari Umemoto is the managing director of Africa Business Partners. The following is an excerpt from an interview she gave to The Yomiuri Shimbun about the TICAD 9 summit.

Japanese companies are now making inroads into Africa. But underlying this progress is a sense of crisis that they will not be able to survive by operating in Japan alone, as the country’s population declines and its markets shrink. Markets in Africa, where there are still a lot of unmet needs and newcomers can have chances to win, look attractive to many companies.

I have consulted with companies that want to enter African markets but do not know how to start a business in a place which is totally unfamiliar to them. However, Japanese companies have advantages which are generally recognized even in Africa, including their financial power, reliability and technological capabilities.

If they can make good use of these advantages, they can fare well in markets where China and European countries are currently ahead of them. The dismantling of USAID by the administration of U.S. President Donald Trump can be seen as an opportunity for Japan to enter fields such as public sanitation and fighting poverty, which were previously the purview of the United States.

While the focus of the debates at TICAD is shifting from aid to investment, I hope that this year’s summit will be an opportunity to consider what benefits Japan can obtain from Africa. At the time of the first TICAD meeting, the Japanese side saw it as necessary to draw African nations into alignment with them, no matter the cost. Japan’s present-day representatives ought to remember the stance the country held in those years and hammer out flexible bargaining strategies.

Many companies and organizations are participating in this year’s TICAD, which offers them a precious opportunity due to the fact that many VIPs from African countries are visiting Japan. We should not let TICAD 9 be nothing more than a conference — I hope it will be a space in which new businesses can be born.