About Africa Region

Our industry continues to struggle through a difficult downturn and this has had a significant impact on membership, activities and sponsorship in our Africa Region. Despite these challenges we have witnessed several important successes over the past year and the Leadership and Membership of the Region remain enthusiastic about our future. For the first time in the history of the Region we successfully held an all-continent technical conference in Nairobi, Kenya – the Africa Energy and Technology Conference (AETC).

These have been challenging yet rewarding years for our region as we have tried to weather the latest petroleum industry downturn. Under David Blanchard’s leadership, AAPG Africa Region has continued to grow the Young Professional (YP) and Student Chapter Programs, and the Africa Region continues to conduct one of the most extensive and competitive Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) programs in all of AAPG. The Distinguished Lecture (DL) Series and Visiting Geoscientists (VG) Program are reaching increasing numbers of countries and universities across the continent and are perhaps two of our best ways to expose larger numbers of our colleagues to some of the benefits of AAPG.

The last year has seen a renaissance in AAPG’s involvement in technical meetings across Africa. The relationship between our affiliated society the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists (NAPE) and AAPG remains strong, and our members take active roles in the NAPE Annual ICE held in Lagos each fall. Joint activities between NAPE and AAPG will remain an important aspect of our western Africa program during the coming years. Another affiliated organization, the Egyptian Petroleum Exploration Society (EPEX), joined with us to conduct a very successful Geotechnical Workshop (GTW) in Alexandria during March 2016. This was the first GTW held in Africa since 2009. And the big news is that the Africa Region will conduct its first all-Africa conference in December of this year in Nairobi – the inaugural Africa Energy and Technology Conference (AETC).

With strong IBA, YP, DL, and VG programs, and renewed vigor in our Africa-focused technical meetings, we have a great deal of momentum to help carry us forward over the coming year and the Africa Region is proud of all of these accomplishments.

The year 2013/2014 was a very eventful year for the African Region.

One of the major highlights of the year was the establishment of the Africa Region office after many years of planning. The Africa Region office located in Lagos, Nigeria currently resides in the Nigerian Association of Petroleum Explorationists’ (NAPE) office building.

Mrs. Delia Kuye, an alumnus of the University of Reading, England and University of Aberdeen, Scotland was employed as Programs Manager. She assumed office in October 2013 and positive effects of the AR office are already being felt.