At this opening session, senior representatives from governments and companies will explore the main theme of this year’s U.S.-Africa Business Summit: Enhancing Africa’s Value in Global Value Chains.  There is an increasingly broad array of examples of successful initiatives to increase the value that African enterprises add to production, ranging from Botswana’s example of transforming diamond processing to advanced automobile and vaccine manufacturing to innovations in business and telecommunications services to African-made creative industry productions. African enterprises are also increasingly successful in creating regional and continental linkages that are in turn, creating new possibilities for growth and job creation, in part energized by Africa Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA). This plenary will highlight common themes from examples of successful endeavors and explore how to replicate and scale these efforts to expand collaboration between U.S. and African companies.