The Africa Kaizen Award (AKA) is an awarding system for good practices of quality and productivity improvement (Kaizen) under a framework of the Africa Kaizen Initiative (AKI), which is jointly implemented by the African Union Development Agency (AUDA-NEPAD) and the Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA). The first AKA was initiated and launched at the Africa Annual Kaizen Conference (AKAC), hosted by the Government of Tunisia in 2019.

Kaizen practitioners from various African countries participated in the competition, and the winners were decorated with AKA Awards for the first time. AKA2023 marks the fifth edition of the AKA awarding process since it started. In the last four awarding processes, invaluable experiences and accumulated knowhow of AKA operations were gained, which could be utilised by the Examination Committee (EC) members of AKA to develop its vision, mission and strategies; and to review its evaluation criteria and selection process aimed at improving its system for implementation as of 2024.

The focuses of reviewing the process of AKA are mainly to:

1) Review the objectives of AKA and clarify its long-term vision, mission and strategies.

2) Review the evaluation criteria of AKA to compare comparative and absolute assessments and select the appropriate one in the context of AKA.

3) Review the scoring process of AKA to make it possible to accommodate a larger number of nominees to participate.

4) Elaborate measures to improve its publicity and name recognition in international business.