The Africa Center, a nonprofit, nonpartisan, multidisciplinary institution, provides a gateway for engagement with contemporary Africa. The Center’s work is premised on the idea that this emerging market of one billion people, characterized by extraordinary diversity and complexity, is inescapably relevant to building a prosperous, secure, and desirable future.
Minutes from the United Nations and located at One Museum Mile on Fifth Avenue adjoining Harlem in New York City, The Africa Center will operate locally and globally to transform our understanding of the world’s oldest continent, which also boasts its youngest population. Encompassing culture, policy, and business, The Africa Center promotes partnership, collaboration, dialogue and understanding between African artists, business leaders and civil society and their counterparts in the United States and beyond. The Africa Center will host visual, performing, and digital arts presentations; develop and disseminate innovative educational tools; convene focused, thoughtful peer-to-peer exchanges; and sponsor results-oriented policy research.
In its first three years of being fully operational, the Center will focus primarily on three themes that resonate particularly powerfully in New York City: urbanization, managing diversity, and empowering and engaging young people. This fertile starting ground recognizes the fact that Africa is the most rapidly urbanizing continent on the planet; home to extraordinary religious, cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and environmental diversity; and demographically is the youngest region in the world. These themes will inform our work across our three major lines of activity.
