On 18 November 2025, the Kenya School of Government (KSG) will host a major conference bringing together lawmakers, arbitrators, academics, business leaders, civil society, and athletes from across Africa and further afield. The event will explore how international arbitration and alternative dispute resolution (ADR) can be pivotal tools to shape a fairer, greener, more competitive continent.
With six inter‑related themes framing the discussions, the conference promises to be a turning point in thinking about how Kenya, and Africa more broadly, can deepen its role as a hub for international arbitration while balancing public interest, sustainability, and access.
Key Themes
- Cost, Confidence, and Competitiveness: Rethinking Kenya’s Attractiveness as an International Arbitration Hub
This stream will probe Kenya’s current gaps cost‑structures, judicial support, infrastructure, seats of arbitration, enforceability of awards and explore reforms needed to boost confidence among foreign investors and local parties. It will seek comparative insights from jurisdictions that have successfully shifted to being arbitration friendly, including how to reduce delays, lower transaction and tribunal costs, and lift regulatory or institutional barriers. - Arbitrating the Green Transition: ADR in Environmental, Climate, and ESG Disputes in Africa
As renewable energy, carbon markets, environmental regulation and ESG obligations gain traction, so too do disputes in these spheres. This theme will examine how arbitration and ADR can accommodate environmental disputes; how to craft environmental or ESG clauses; methods for integrating climate law, sustainability goals; and ensuring ADR institutions and arbitrators have the expertise to handle such matters. - Africa–China Trade and Investment Disputes: Leveraging Arbitration and ADR for Balanced, Fair, and Sustainable Partnerships
Recognising the immense growth in China‑Africa trade, investment in infrastructure, energy, mining, logistics, this theme will focus on how ADR can help ensure partnerships are equitable, dispute frameworks are transparent, and resolution mechanisms avoid bias and deliver sustainable outcomes. It will address issues like the negotiation of dispute clauses in bilateral/multilateral investment agreements, transparency, local capacity, and balancing foreign investor protections with host state regulatory sovereignty. - Athletes, Governance, and Arbitration: Shaping Africa’s Sports Dispute Resolution Future
Sports increasingly face complex legal, regulatory, and commercial disputes from doping, contract and image rights, to governance failures. Under this theme, the conference will look at how ADR / arbitration can be structured to be accessible to athletes; how regulatory bodies, sports federations, and courts interact; what best practice models exist for sports arbitration globally; and how to build domestic capacity so that African athletes have fair, efficient avenues for dispute resolution. - Making AfCFTA Work: Arbitration and ADR as Catalysts for Africa’s Intra‑Trade
The African Continental Free Trade Area holds promise to scale intra‑African trade, yet trade disputes, non‑tariff barriers, contract enforcement, and regulatory divergence threaten that promise. Arbitration / ADR might fill critical gaps: efficient cross‑border dispute resolution, harmonised procedural rules, enforceability, cost‑efficient mechanisms for SMEs, etc. This theme will explore mechanisms to embed ADR in AfCFTA’s institutional architecture and how Kenya can position itself as a center for such dispute resolution. - Big Pharma, Public Health, and Arbitration in Africa: Balancing Innovation, Access, and Regulation
One of the more sensitive and urgent areas, this theme will explore how arbitration intersects with issues of pharmaceuticals, patenting, public health emergencies, vaccine procurement, regulatory oversight, and trade agreements (e.g. TRIPS). Key questions will include how to ensure access to affordable medicines, protect public health during crises, while preserving incentives for innovation and how ADR could handle disputes over regulation, licensing, and compliance in a transparent, balanced manner.
Why This Conference Matters
- Strategic Timing: With Africa moving deeper into regional integration (via AfCFTA), with global pressure to meet ESG obligations, and with rapidly growing foreign investment (especially from China and elsewhere), the landscape is changing. Dispute resolution frameworks need to keep up.
- Kenya’s Opportunity: Kenya has many of the ingredients: a strong legal profession, improving institutional frameworks, comparative proximity to both regional economies and international institutions, but also challenges: cost, delays, and sometimes skepticism about neutrality or enforceability. This conference is a chance to set a roadmap.
- Inclusive Stakeholder Engagement: By bringing together athletes, public health actors, environmentalists, trade experts, and legal practitioners, the dialogues can produce more holistic, resilient models of arbitration and ADR (not just commercial or investment arbitration).
- Policy and Legal Reform Potential: Outcomes from the conference could inform amendments to Kenyan arbitration law, model clauses in contracts, treaty negotiation strategies (especially investment treaties), capacity building in courts and ADR institutions, ethical and technical standards (especially for ESG claims).
What to Expect on 18 November 2025
- Keynote Addresses from high‑level officials (e.g. the Attorney General, Chief Justice, Ministers of Trade / Environment / Sports) and leading international ADR figures.
- Panel Discussions / Roundtables for each of the six themes, with speakers from local and international institutions, policy makers, practitioners, investor‑state arbitration experts, NGO / civil society voices.
- Break‑out Workshops, particularly for emerging arbitrators, legal academics, athletes / sports administrators, health regulation experts, to allow hands‑on discussion / drafting of model clauses, mock arbitration issues, etc.
- Networking Sessions to build linkages between institutions (arbitration centres, universities, regulatory bodies), and between sectors (health, sports, environment, trade).
- Publication / Policy Output: a conference report, possibly model contracts or clauses, policy recommendations, perhaps even white papers to feed into government policy and African regional bodies.
Challenges and Forward Questions
- How can Kenya manage the cost‑barriers to making arbitration accessible to SMEs and individuals, not just large corporations or states?
- How to ensure confidence in arbitrators, institutions, and seats (avoiding perceptions of bias, ensuring enforceability, judicial support, timely process, transparency).
- Balancing sustainable development/regulation with investor protection (especially where ESG, environmental/climate regulation is concerned): arbitration frameworks must be sensitive to non‑commercial public interest norms.
- Ensuring that sports and public health disputes, which often involve vulnerable populations, have fair access to justice, without high arbitration costs or procedural complexity.
- Aligning Kenya’s laws, courts, infrastructural capacity (venues, specialist arbitrators, expert witnesses) with international best practice.
Implications Beyond Kenya
Even though the event is hosted in Nairobi, its themes resonate across Africa. What emerges in policy, model rules, and practice could influence arbitration law and ADR frameworks in other countries; could help harmonize dispute resolution under AfCFTA; and could shape how Africa negotiates investment treaties and trade pacts. It could also feed into global debates about ESG arbitration, public health emergencies, and the responsibility of trade/investment partners (including China, multinational pharma, sports governing bodies) in fair governance.
Conclusion
As Kenya positions itself at the crossroads of trade growth, environmental urgency, sport’s globalisation, and health security, the question is not whether it can be a pre‑eminent arbitration hub but what shape that hub should take, what values it embodies, and whom it serves.
The conference at Kenya School of Government on 18 November 2025 offers a timely platform for rethinking those questions. If it achieves even a fraction of its promise more accessible, credible, fair arbitration, grounded in sustainability and public interest it could change the curve for how disputes are resolved in Africa for decades to come.
