Few people think about it, but bodies like the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or the International Football Association Board (IFAB) set rules that structure entire swaths of the global economy and everyday life — from industrial manufacturing to the laws of football.
For Africa, long a bystander rather than a participant in drafting these standards, a step forward came in October 2025: ISO and the African Organisation for Standardisation (ARSO) signed a cooperation agreement in Kigali, meant to better integrate the continent into global rule-making.
In sport, IFAB continues to set the Laws of the Game applied at the 2026 World Cup — with no official announcement so far confirming any specific measure on suspensions for key players, a subject that keeps coming up in discussions around the tournament.
The mining sector illustrates the opposite tension these standards can create: in 2024, Niger reassigned several mining permits, including some tied to uranium, to public entities — a sovereignty move that bypasses the industry's usual international standards.
These standards are never neutral: they reflect economic and geopolitical power balances, and countries with no say in drafting them risk simply enduring them rather than shaping them.
The ISO-ARSO agreement is a step in the right direction, but its real impact will be measured by African countries' — including Cameroon's — ability to push their own priorities, whether in fintech, renewable energy or football, into forums where they have long been absent.
