Mirror Multimedia Communications MMC provided photography coverage for the inaugural Africa Care Forum, held September 2 to 4, 2026 at the African Union Commission headquarters in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Convened by the Commission’s Women, Gender and Youth Directorate (WGYD) under the theme “Placing Care at the Centre of Africa’s Development Agenda”, the Forum brought together Member State delegations, ministers, development partners, researchers, care advocates and private sector representatives around a single proposition: that care work is economic infrastructure rather than private obligation. Roughly 70 percent of unpaid care work in Africa is carried by women and girls, who spend about three and a half times more time on it than men, and the Forum existed to move that fact from the margins of social policy into the centre of the continent’s growth agenda. Across three days the programme ran from a closed session through the official opening ceremony, parallel sessions, several panel sessions and the closing ceremony, and delivered a landmark outcome; experts from Member States validated the first ever Common Africa Position on Care Work.
MMC was brought onto the Forum’s coverage team to deliver the photographic record of all three days, and that record was made by a single photographer. An African Union setting imposes its own conditions: concurrent sessions running in separate rooms, protocol governing where a camera may stand and when it may not fire, a closed session calling for discretion rather than presence, and a delegate list on which the difference between a Head of Delegation and a technical expert is rarely visible from across a plenary hall. With one camera on the ground and no second angle to fall back on, coverage had to be planned rather than chased. We worked the Forum as one continuous narrative rather than three unrelated shoot days, moving on a schedule built around the arc the record would need afterwards: the ceremonial frames that carry institutional weight, the working frames that show a continental body actually deliberating, and the human frames of delegates, researchers and care advocates in conversation between sessions. Editing ran in real time, in the gaps between sessions rather than after the Forum closed, so that selects were culled, graded and moving to the client while the room was still sitting. The result is one consistent look across all three days and a usable record delivered without the lag that normally follows a three-day programme.
Opening Ceremony
Policy and Investment Plenary
Member State Session and the Common Africa Position on Care Work
Delegates and the Wall of Care
Official Group Photograph
