Crossroads Asia | Diplomacy

Is 2026 the Year of Booming Central Asia-Africa Relations?

There has been a curious uptick in Central Asia-Africa relations this year, led by Kyrgyzstan.

On May 20, Kazakh President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev welcomed Kenyan President William Ruto to Astana, marking the first-ever official visit by a Kenyan president to the country.

Kenya doesn’t have an embassy in Kazakhstan – though it now plans to open one – and Kazakhstan opened its embassy in Nairobi, the Kenyan capital, only last year. 

Of the Central Asian states, Kazakhstan has the largest diplomatic footprint in Africa, with embassies now in six countries (Algeria, Egypt, Ethiopia, Kenya, Morocco, and South Africa). Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Tajikistan all have a single mission each in Africa. The latter two are in Egypt, while Kyrgyzstan opened an embassy in Ethiopia last year. Turkmenistan does not have an embassy anywhere in Africa. 

Kazakhstan has had observer status in the African Union since 2013 and earlier this year Kyrgyzstan received that status.

It’s been an unusually busy 2026 in Central Asia-Africa relations, with Kyrgyzstan the most active player by far.

In March, Ghanaian Foreign Minister Samuel Okudzeto Ablakwa traveled to Bishkek, the first-ever African foreign minister to make an official visit to the country. In late April, Togolese President Faure Gnassingbé became the first-ever African head of state to be welcomed officially in Kyrgyzstan. In early May, Minister for Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora of Seychelles Barry Faure touched down in Bishkek.

Meanwhile, Kyrgyz Foreign Minister Jeenbek Kulubayev is making the first-ever official visits by a Kyrgyz foreign minister to Mozambique and Namibia this week.

In late April, Kyrgyz analyst Zamirbek Minbaev penned an article for The Times of Central Asia honing in on the geopolitical factors undergirding Kyrgyzstan’s suddenly active Africa policy: namely sanctions, Russia, and China. While cautioning against an overly simplistic reading of every Kyrgyz initiative as directed by Moscow, Minbaev nevertheless argues that “Kyrgyzstan may be becoming part of a distributed sanctions-era infrastructure in which Russian, Chinese, Central Asian, and Global South interests increasingly overlap.”

This expands upon a phenomenon other analysts have noticed. For example, in June 2025, Brett Erickson argued in an article for The Diplomat that China was “laying the foundation for a........

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