Regional Parliamentary Dialogue on Political Party and Campaign Financing Transparency

From 4 to 7 May 2026, young members of parliament from across Africa, with strong representation from Southern Africa, gathered in Cape Town for the Regional Parliamentary Dialogue on Political Party and Campaign Financing Transparency. Convened under the African Young Parliamentarians Network (AYPN), the dialogue brought together participants from Angola, Botswana, Chad, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Eswatini, Kenya, Namibia, Madagascar, Mauritius, Malawi, Mozambique, Lesotho, Seychelles, South Africa, Tanzania and Zimbabwe, alongside representatives of electoral management bodies, anti-corruption institutions, financial intelligence structures, civil society organisations, and technical experts working on governance and accountability.

The African Young Parliamentarians Network (AYPN) is a pan-African network of young legislators with established regional chapters in Central and Eastern Africa, Southern Africa, and Western Africa. It brings together serving legislators committed to strengthening democratic governance, transparency, and accountability across the continent.

The workshop responded to a question that is becoming harder for African democracies to avoid: how can political systems claim legitimacy when the financing of parties and campaigns remains opaque, unevenly regulated, and vulnerable to abuse? Grounded in the framework of the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC), the dialogue created space for young legislators to examine political finance as a matter deeply tied to democratic integrity, public trust, and the quality of representative politics.

AYPN convened the event together with the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) Anti-Corruption and Financial Crime Hub for Africa, while the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung Regional Programme for Political Dialogue in Sub-Saharan Africa (KAS PolDiSSA) supported the workshop as a partner to the process.

The opening session set the tone for the discussions ahead. Welcoming remarks were delivered by Hon. Anthony Buluma, Executive Director of AYPN, and Mr. Francesco Checchi, UNODC Africa Crime Hub Team Lead, while a keynote address by Hon. Carol Mokgadi Phiri, Member of Parliament, National Assembly of South Africa, underscored the political significance of the convening. Dr. Holger Dix, Director of KAS PolDiSSA, drew attention to the democratic stakes of political finance reform and encouraged participants to see stronger parliaments, stronger parties, and greater transparency not as separate ambitions, but as part of the same democratic project.

Across eleven sessions over four days, participants engaged the issue from multiple angles. Discussions began with UNCAC and global standards on political finance transparency, before moving into the links between campaign financing, corruption risks, money laundering, organised crime, and illicit financial flows. One of the workshop’s real strengths was that it did not stop at diagnosis. The agenda was designed to move steadily from reflection to action. Interactive sessions invited participants to map vulnerabilities in their national systems, identify reform gaps, and think through the parliamentary tools available to them, from legislative amendments and committee hearings to oversight questions and coalition-building across party lines. In that sense, the dialogue retained a practical seriousness throughout.

By the final day, that exchange had matured into concrete outputs. Participants worked on National Action Plans and regional recommendations aimed at advancing transparency and integrity in their respective parliaments. The adoption of the Cape Town Declaration on Political Finance Transparency gave the workshop a collective political expression, signalling a shared commitment by AYPN members to pursue reform beyond the meeting room and into parliamentary life across the region.

The gathering also served a broader strategic purpose for AYPN itself. The launch dinner of the AYPN Strategic Plan 2026–2030 added an important institutional dimension to the week, while the official visit to the Parliament of South Africa offered participants a valuable closing moment of reflection on parliamentary practice, oversight, and democratic responsibility in context.

What emerged from Cape Town was more than a technical conversation on regulation. The dialogue affirmed that political finance transparency is inseparable from the wider struggle to deepen democratic legitimacy in Africa. It also showed the value of sustained cooperation between networks such as AYPN and political foundations such as KAS that are willing to invest in the long-term work of democratic formation. Cape Town showed that a new generation of parliamentarians is ready to make political finance transparency a democratic priority.