Art and Internships: The Africa Center Opens Doors From Fifth Avenue to the Continent

By THT Africa Desk

“However long the night, the dawn will break.”
— African proverb

At 1280 Fifth Avenue, where Harlem meets Central Park, The Africa Center is doing three things at once this season. On its walls, five young African photographers show how communities are living through a changing climate. In its offices, a program is sending diaspora graduate students to work at institutions across the continent. And through its Global Africa Gateway, The Africa Center works with one of Africa’s most important banks to open doors to the continent’s economy.

Taken together, they make a simple case: the bridge between Harlem and Africa is not only cultural. It is also a path to careers and capital.

The Artists: “Lines of Survival”

The Africa Center’s current exhibition, Lines of Survival: Living, Adapting, Imagining Tomorrow, is presented with Africa Soft Power and runs through March 31, 2027. It brings together the winning and finalist work of the 2026 Africa Soft Power Climate Storytelling Fellowship and Photo Essay Prize, which invited photographers aged 18 to 30 from across Africa and the diaspora to document how communities live with climate pressure, adapt to it, and imagine what comes next.

South African photographer Mpumelelo Buthelezi was named the 2026 Climate Storytelling Fellow and overall winner for E’Plazini: A Place to Call Home for Waste Collectors, a series on waste pickers in the Dryhook informal settlement in Soweto. He received a US$2,000 award. Four finalists join him:

• Kevin Ochieng Onyango (Kenya), Climate Realities: communities in northern Kenya in the fourth year of a drought. The series looks at water scarcity, changing weather patterns and the loss of livelihoods through the people living through them.
• Vanessa Mulondo (Uganda), The Fishermen’s Tale: a series documenting how fishermen adapt their practices as water levels shift and weather patterns become less predictable.
• Brian Ongoro (Kenya), When the Water Stays: families living with persistent flooding near Lake Victoria in Kenya and how they continue to live, work and adapt as flooding becomes part of everyday life.
• Nicolas Vava (Togo), Stand in the Sand: coastal erosion and the fishing communities along Togo’s shoreline.

From the Exhibition

Lines of Survival: Living, Adapting, Imagining Tomorrow

The jury included Polly Irungu, founder of Black Women Photographers and former official photo editor to Vice President Kamala Harris; Fujifilm Global X-Photographer Bernard Kalu; curator Gaëtane Verna; and photographer and filmmaker Tsoku Maela.

Dr. Nkiru Balonwu, founder and creative director of Africa Soft Power, said in the exhibition’s announcement that climate conversations about finance and policy are “incomplete without the people living the consequences of the decisions being made.” These photographs, she said, show “loss and pressure, but also work, ingenuity, adaptation and the determination to keep going.”

Visit: The Africa Center, 1280 Fifth Avenue (at 110th Street). Tuesday to Sunday, 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. Free and open to the public, through March 31, 2027.

The Internships: A Paid Path to the Continent

The second door is for students. Through the Global Africa Gateway, The Africa Center runs a Diaspora Internship Program that places graduate-level diaspora talent with African multilateral institutions and private-sector firms.

For 2026, the Gateway selected nine currently enrolled or recently graduated students from the diaspora, each with a strong interest in building professional ties to the continent. Interns receive a US$10,000 stipend to cover travel, lodging and other costs, and applications are reviewed by The Africa Center, Afreximbank and host organizations.

“With half of all new global workforce entrants by 2030 slated to be from the African continent,” said Vance Whitfield, Director of the Global Africa Gateway and Diaspora Strategy, the program is “a critical platform to connect top talents from the Diaspora with sectors and markets critical to both Africa’s growth and the globe’s sustainability.”

For Harlem’s students and parents: the 2026 application window closed in February. Watch The Africa Center’s website and LinkedIn page for the next call for applications, and start preparing now.

The Global Africa Gateway and Afreximbank

The Africa Center established the Gateway with the African Export-Import Bank, or Afreximbank, a pan-African development bank founded by African governments in 1993 to finance and grow the continent’s trade. Afreximbank is The Africa Center’s anchor partner in the Global Africa Gateway, which launched in Harlem in September 2024 to create structured pathways for diaspora investors, entrepreneurs, professionals, institutions and students to take part in Africa’s economic future.

Its flagship gathering, the Future Africa Forum, met again this September. According to The Africa Center, it brought together more than 240 heads of state, policymakers, business leaders, investors and diaspora leaders to turn diplomatic goodwill into trade and investment partnerships between Africa and its 200-million-strong global diaspora.

Afreximbank’s reach extends to the Caribbean as well: as of last year, 13 CARICOM states had become members of the bank. Its president, Dr. George Elombi, put the institution’s spirit plainly in an address this fall: “When the world retreats, Africa must not.”

Why It Matters Uptown

For New Yorkers, The Africa Center offers a place to see the continent through its own artists, a door for young people into careers abroad, and a front-row seat to the deals and partnerships shaping Africa’s rise. A morning at the exhibition, a coffee at the CUP Café downstairs, and a look at the Gateway’s next internship call would make a good start.

The photographs in “Lines of Survival” show communities that refuse to give up when the water rises or the rain stops. The Gateway asks the diaspora to bring that same resolve home to the continent, one internship, one investment and one partnership at a time. The Harlem Times will keep following both.

Sources: The Africa Center and Africa Soft Power exhibition announcement; The Africa Center, 2026 Global Africa Gateway internship cohort; AllAfrica, Future Africa Forum 2025; Ahram Online, Afreximbank president George Elombi.