From AllAfrica. Analysis by George Odera Outa, Nairobi, and K. Riva Levinson,Washington, D.C.

Odera-Outa is associate director at africapractice, a pan-African strategic communications and investments advisory firm. Riva Levinson is managing director of KRL International, a Washington, D.C. consultancy specializing in the emerging markets.

While U.S. President Barack Obama’s trip to Africa, by design and protocol, will have a bilateral focus with stops in Kenya and Ethiopia, his mission maintains a context larger than the agendas of these two east African nations.

According to the White House, Obama’s main objective will be to participate in the Global Entrepreneurship Summit (GES) to be held outside of Nairobi from July 24 to July 26 – the second GES to be held on the continent, but the very first to be located in sub-Saharan Africa.

The GES, launched in 2009, is predicated on the belief that providing a path toward opportunity for the world’s young people will empower them to provide for themselves and their families, and in doing so, to build a society committed to the preservation of institutions, of community and of hope for the future. Economic empowerment is the antidote to extremism and terrorism – an ideology predicated on a belief that only from institutional destruction can a future be built.

Beyond the power of the individual, the GES focuses on another core belief of the White House and this U.S. President: the future development of Africa and most of the world’s emerging markets lies in enabling the private sector. The times of open-ended aid budgets are gone – there is neither the budget nor the political will for major new foreign assistance initiatives.

Those that will make it through the Washington partisan politics are programs like Obama’s signature Power Africa, which utilizes limited government assistance and government incentives to enable the private sector to invest in power generation, transmission and distribution.

As such, the GES is likely to take on the obstacles that hinder enabling the entrepreneur: the constraints to opportunity and growth, including access to capital, lack of skills in the job-creating markets, the additional cost of poor infrastructure including power, roads, and telecommunications, government bureaucracy, weak regulation, distorted taxation and institutional corruption.

What we are likely, therefore, to see from the GES is a transition in the U.S.-Africa relationship, marked by movement away from donor-country relationships toward more sustainable public-private partnerships and increased private sector engagement.

We want the world to see Kenyans and the continent not only in the real terms of where they are, but also where they are going. This will be a celebration of pride and promise.

Last but not least, Obama’s greatly anticipated visit to Kenya will finally allow the nation and its people to celebrate their proud ties to his family heritage.

Read more at AllAfrica.