Nigeria’s Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Taiwo Oyedele, has called for urgent reforms to the global financial architecture, saying Africa continues to face structural barriers that limit access to affordable capital and long-term industrial growth.

Speaking on the sidelines of the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, Mr Oyedele said African economies are still burdened by what he described as a “prejudice premium” that inflates borrowing costs and discourages long-term investment into the continent.

In a post shared on his official X handle on Wednesday, he said the current international financial system constrains Africa’s industrialisation ambitions through high borrowing costs, restrictive financing terms, limited access to long-term capital, and inadequate funding for productivity and value addition.

Beyond global reforms, the minister stressed the need for African countries to strengthen domestic systems by improving governance, ensuring policy stability, enforcing contracts, and deepening regional integration.

He warned that fragmented markets across the continent weaken competitiveness in a global economy that increasingly rewards scale and integration.

Mr Oyedele also urged African governments to mobilise domestic savings, including pension funds, while creating stronger pathways for private capital to flow into productive sectors.

ALSO READ: At Africa Forward Summit, Tinubu calls for reform of global financial architecture

He noted that with more than $120 trillion in global private capital seeking investment opportunities, Africa must position itself as a competitive investment destination rather than remain primarily a recipient of development assistance.

According to him, financing priorities must shift from raw material extraction and crisis response toward value addition, infrastructure development, skills, technology, innovation and regional value chains.

He added that Africa’s long-term growth will depend on productivity, integration and value creation rather than dependency.

PREMIUM TIMES earlier reported that President Bola Tinubu, at the Africa Forward Summit in Nairobi, said the growing economic relationship between Nigeria and France must translate into tangible development outcomes, as trade between both countries reached $4.7 billion in 2025.

Productivity software maker Notion is stepping into the agentic era.

In a live-streamed product announcement on Wednesday, the company, known best for its collaborative note-taking app, introduced a new developer platform that extends the capabilities of its custom AI agents, connects with external agents, and allows teams to build automated multi-step workflows that can pull in data from any database.

By building an orchestration layer — a system that coordinates AI work across multiple tools and data sources — Notion is positioning itself as more than a note-taker with AI features and instead as a hub where people and agents can collaborate across tools and databases.

In February, Notion first launched its Custom Agents — AI teammates that handle repetitive tasks, like answering frequently asked questions, compiling status updates, and automating workflows. Since then, Notion customers have built over one million agents, the company says.

However, these agents had limitations. They couldn’t connect with external data or use custom logic. External agents that companies used also didn’t have a way to connect with the Notion workspace. Teams had to work around these problems by using third-party automation platforms or writing their own scripts that run on their own infrastructure.

“It’s true that, historically, Notion hasn’t been the most developer-focused platform,” said Ivan Zhao, Notion co-founder and CEO, during the livestream. “But things are changing.”

Now, Notion will allow teams to deploy their own custom code. With its new Workers, Notion’s cloud-based environment for running custom code, customers can write their logic and deploy it to a secure sandbox (an isolated environment that keeps the code from interfering with other systems). This allows teams to do things like sync their data into Notion, build custom tools, and trigger work with webhooks — which are automated signals that kick off actions when something happens in another app — without needing to rely on external infrastructure.

You don’t even have to write the code. The company points out that your preferred AI coding agent can do it for you.

The Workers will use the same credit system as Custom Agents, but Notion is making this free through August, so developers can experiment.

Syncing external data sources is also a part of the Notion Developer Platform. Powered by Workers, the database sync feature can pull in data from any database with an API. That means you could access data from places like Salesforce, Zendesk, Postgres, and others within your own Notion databases — and keep the data current.

Zhao noted that this means that Notion’s users can now “use your Notion database as a sheer canvas to power both your workflows and your agents.”

Workers can also build agent tools with custom logic, for those times when connecting with a third-party via MCP — short for Model Context Protocol, an emerging standard that lets AI tools connect to external data and services — isn’t enough.

Another addition allows Notion’s users to chat directly with external AI agents they use, assign them work, and track their progress, as if they were one of Notion’s own custom agents. At launch, Notion says that Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and Decagon are supported partner agents, but it plans to add more.

There’s an External Agent API, too, if teams want to connect their own internal agents with Notion, like those they’ve built specifically for their company’s needs.

Developers and agents interact with Notion’s new Developer Platform via the Notion CLI, a command-line tool for developers, available on the company’s Business and Enterprise Plans.

The Developer Platform represents a shift in strategy for Notion as it becomes more of a programmable platform than just an application, setting it up to compete with other workflow automation platforms. As businesses increasingly look to automate knowledge work and build internal AI systems, a platform that ties together agents, custom code, and live data in one place starts to look less like a productivity app and more like core infrastructure.

It also follows the broader trend among AI companies, which have been moving beyond the AI chatbot to offer agentic tools that can take actions across different software platforms.

“Any data, any tool, any agent — that’s the big picture for the Notion Developer Platform,” Zhao said.