In our initial efforts at raising Businesspersons as Kingdom Resource Stewards all over the continent, it has become increasingly clear that Professionals and Resource controllers have the strongest influence in how the seven influence areas of society are run – namely Government & Politics; Finance & Economics; Education; Family; Media; Sports & Entertainment and last but not the least Religion i.e. the Church.
The Africa Kingdom Business Forum (AKBF) was formally established in 2003 by the leadership of Intercessors for Africa (IFA) also known as Africa House of Prayer (AHOP). However, its true origins actually date back to 1997, where some leaders of IFA were invited to speak at the inaugural All Africa Prayer Convocation, held in Addis Ababa Ethiopia in 1997. It was there, while preparing messages for this conference, that the Lord revealed to them, that for Africa to find its true place in His purposes, the Lordship of Jesus Christ has to be brought into the African Marketplace which has uninhibited dominance by the powers of darkness. To achieve this, there is need for a major shift by the Church in Africa, which neither recognizes nor empowers believers operating in the African marketplace as ministers outside the sanctuary.
The Africa Kingdom Business Forum (AKBF) was therefore initially conceived as a business initiative aimed at providing an interactive, business opportunity, networking and training forum for raising Kingdom-minded Christian businesspersons as resource stewards within the African content.
Over the past few years as we reviewed the distressing outcomes of the over 200 years of modern day missions within the African continent wherein despite significant impressive statistics of having Africa being eighty percent Christians South of the Sahara by the end of the 19th century and being the most evangelized continent in the world, we observed that the narrative all over was the same: poverty, disease, violence, corruption, injustice and chaos within Africa. This devastation we understood as the fruit of preaching salvation alone, without the rest of the Biblical message.
It has therefore become evident that AKBF needs to broaden its vision and mission from merely raising Kingdom minded Businesspersons as Resource Stewards for the nations of Africa, to becoming an institution that serves as a roundtable for Business persons as well as Professionals, who have a kingdom of God worldview, to interact for providing transformation across the seven mountains of society in African nations. We are therefore repositioning ourselves with the following new vision and mission statements: