Africa’s largest Francophone digital marketing gathering is about to hit a milestone. ADICOM Days 2026, the tenth edition of the Africa Digital Community event, opens in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire on Wednesday 16 and Thursday 17 April, marking ten full years of the conference that has quietly grown into one of the most important meeting points on the continent for digital creators, marketers, brands, and platform leaders.
The 2026 edition arrives under the banner “Digital en Afrique: comprendre les tendances”, which translates loosely as understanding the trends shaping African digital. For a programme built specifically around the realities of growing brands and creator businesses in African markets, the timing could not be sharper. The continent’s digital economy has crossed several inflection points in the last twelve months, and Abidjan is where a meaningful slice of the industry is gathering this week to make sense of it.
Why the 10th edition carries weight
ADICOM Days began as a relatively small Francophone digital community gathering and has, over the past decade, expanded into a fully bilingual, pan African event drawing participants from Senegal, Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya, South Africa, Cameroon, France, and beyond. The anniversary framing this year is more than ceremonial. The conversations that started on the ADICOM stage five and six years ago, around the rise of African creators, the maturation of digital advertising, and the localisation of global platforms, have largely played out exactly as predicted. The 10th edition gives the community a moment to take stock of what comes next.
Organisers have signalled that the 2026 programme will lean heavily into the next decade rather than the last one. Expect dedicated tracks on artificial intelligence in marketing, the maturing African creator economy, content monetisation, the shift from influencer marketing to creator businesses, and the platform partnerships now reshaping advertising spend across the continent.
Who’s on the stage
The speaker lineup reflects ADICOM’s reach across the African digital ecosystem. Among the names confirmed for the 2026 keynote programme is Stanislaus Martins, Managing Director, Sub Saharan Africa at Aleph Group, who is set to deliver one of the headline sessions: “A Two Speed Africa: What does a dynamic market look like? Nigeria, Kenya, South Africa.” The session is expected to unpack why three markets are pulling sharply ahead of the rest of the continent and what that means for brands building pan African strategies. We covered Martins’s recent promotion to the Sub Saharan Africa role in our profile of his appointment at Aleph.
Beyond the keynotes, the two day programme will run multiple panel formats and workshop tracks, drawing in agency heads, brand managers, platform reps, and creators from across Francophone and Anglophone Africa.
What attendees can expect
Two full days of programming are scheduled, mixing keynote presentations, panel sessions, workshops, and structured networking time designed to produce actual deals and partnerships rather than just business card exchanges. ADICOM has historically been one of the few African digital events where senior platform executives, agency leadership, and brand decision makers all show up in the same room, and the 2026 edition is expected to maintain that mix.
Sessions will run in both French and English, reflecting ADICOM’s deliberate position as a bridge event between Francophone and Anglophone Africa, a market split that has historically left both sides poorer for the disconnect.
Why this matters for African marketers
The continent’s marketing and tech industries have spent the last year processing a wave of structural shifts. The creator economy is maturing into a $3 billion plus market with serious infrastructure problems still to solve. Meta, TikTok, Google, and X have all rewritten their commercial relationships with African markets in the last 18 months. AI is moving from experimental to operational across major brand campaigns. ADICOM Days 2026 sits squarely at the intersection of all of these shifts, in the largest French speaking digital market on the continent, hosted by the community that has been tracking the trajectory longer than almost anyone else.
For marketers, brand managers, and platform leaders not yet on the ground in Abidjan this week, the full programme and registration details are available on the official site at adicom-days.com. Ten years in, this is one of the few African digital events where missing it actually costs you something.
