AfCFTA at a Crossroads: Why Intra-African Trade Still Lags the Promise

African Journal of Emerging Issues (AJEI) — Policy & Economics

Africa’s growth outlook for 2026 looks encouraging on paper. The African Development Bank, the UN Economic Commission for Africa, and private forecasters all point to GDP growth in the 4.0–4.3% range this year, helped by easing inflation, stronger commodity prices for mineral exporters, and greater macroeconomic stability in several large economies (African Development Bank, 2026; UN Economic Commission for Africa, 2026; Frontier Africa Reports, 2026). Yet beneath that headline number sits a harder question: how much of that growth is actually flowing between African countries, rather than out to external partners?

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was supposed to be the answer. Seven years after African Union member states adopted the agreement in Kigali, and more than four years since it formally entered into force, the numbers tell a story of real but modest progress — and of a single market still very much under construction.

The gap between ambition and uptake

AfCFTA’s founding promise was bold: a market of 54 countries and roughly 1.4 billion people, with the World Bank estimating it could lift intra-African trade by more than 50% by the mid-2030s if fully implemented (All Business Africa, 2026). The reality so far is more incremental. Intra-African trade reached an estimated $220 billion in 2024 — a 12.4% rebound from a 2023 contraction — and is projected to climb toward $230 billion in 2026 under an optimistic scenario from the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) (Ecofin Agency, 2026; Gulf Africa Review, 2026).

The trouble is what share of Africa’s total trade that figure actually represents. Intra-African trade has hovered between roughly 15% and 18% of the continent’s total trade for years — a figure AfCFTA Secretary-General Wamkele Mene has repeatedly flagged as stubbornly low compared with intra-regional trade shares of around 60% in Asia and over 70% in Europe (Dawan Africa, 2026). At a 2026 ECOWAS Parliament session, one speaker put it plainly: intra-regional trade still accounts for less than 10% of total trade within West Africa specifically, with member economies continuing to export largely unprocessed raw materials — cotton, palm oil, timber — while occupying the lowest value-added rungs of global supply chains (Guardian Nigeria, 2026).

Three structural bottlenecks explain most of the gap:

1. Incomplete ratification and patchy tariff schedules. As of late 2025, 48 of the African Union’s 55 member states had ratified the AfCFTA agreement, but only 19 had formally published their tariff-reduction schedules — the technical instrument that actually makes preferential tariffs operational (GIS Reports, 2025). Without a published schedule, a country’s AfCFTA commitments remain largely symbolic.

2. Unresolved rules of origin. Determining which goods qualify as “African-made” for preferential treatment has proven one of the most technically contentious parts of implementation, since it requires agreement on local value-added thresholds and processing requirements that different countries interpret very differently depending on their existing industrial base (All Business Africa, 2026).

3. Infrastructure and non-tariff barriers. Weak transport and logistics infrastructure, slow customs digitisation, and non-tariff barriers along key trade corridors continue to add cost and delay to cross-border trade even where tariffs have formally come down (Gulf Africa Review, 2026; GIS Reports, 2025).

What’s starting to work

It isn’t all stagnation. A handful of concrete enablers are beginning to show up in the trade data. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), which allows African businesses to settle cross-border trade in local currencies rather than routing through the US dollar or euro, became fully operational in 2025 and is projected to cut foreign exchange transaction costs by 20–30% (Ecofin Agency, 2026; Guardian Nigeria, 2026). The AfCFTA protocol on digital trade, also adopted in 2025, is beginning to formalise rules for e-commerce and digital services across borders. And manufacturing and agri-food goods are gradually taking a larger share of intra-African trade flows — an estimated 48–50% in 2026, up from 46% the year before — suggesting a slow shift away from Africa’s historic pattern of trading raw commodities across its own borders (Ecofin Agency, 2026).

Individual country stories illustrate the direction of travel. Namibia’s first shipment under AfCFTA rules — a 25,000-tonne consignment of salt to Nigeria in mid-2025 — was a modest volume in continental terms, but symbolically significant as proof that the trade architecture can function when a country commits to using it (GIS Reports, 2025).

The AGOA shock adds urgency

Any assessment of Africa’s trade position in 2026 has to reckon with a parallel disruption: the expiry of the US African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) on 30 September 2025. AGOA had given 32 sub-Saharan African countries duty-free access to the US market for more than 1,800 product categories since 2000. Its lapse — following a period in which the average tariff facing AGOA countries had already climbed from under 0.5% to nearly 10% because of new country-specific US tariffs introduced earlier in 2025 — pushed exporters onto standard Most-Favoured-Nation tariff rates overnight (UNCTAD, 2025a; The Habari Network, 2025).

The impact is sharply uneven across sectors and countries. UN Trade and Development analysis found that African exports of agricultural and manufactured goods would face tariffs two to three times higher than those applied to fuels and minerals — meaning mineral-exporting economies such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, Nigeria, and Angola are largely insulated, while labour-intensive manufacturing economies bear the brunt (UNCTAD, 2025b). The International Trade Centre estimates AGOA’s expiry alone will reduce beneficiary countries’ exports by a further 0.6 percentage points by 2029, on top of an 8% decline already projected from 2025’s broader tariff measures — with apparel and textiles absorbing by far the largest share of that loss, a projected 9.7% decline (African Business, 2025a). In Lesotho, where roughly a third of exports were AGOA-linked and the apparel sector employs 30,000–40,000 workers, mostly women, the stakes are existential for entire local labour markets (The Habari Network, 2025; IATP, 2025).

There are signs of a possible reprieve: the US House Ways and Means Committee approved a three-year AGOA Extension Act in December 2025, though its fate — and the contested question of South Africa’s continued eligibility — remains unresolved as of this writing (Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, 2025). But even optimistic observers now counsel African exporters to stop waiting on Washington and instead treat AGOA’s lapse as a forcing function for diversification (African Business, 2025b).

The policy implication: AGOA’s exit strengthens the case for AfCFTA

The two stories are not unrelated. For two decades, AGOA gave African exporters — particularly in textiles, apparel, and agro-processing — a reliable external market that arguably reduced the urgency of building deeper trading relationships with fellow African economies. Its abrupt withdrawal removes that cushion at precisely the moment AfCFTA needs momentum. As UNCTAD has noted, AGOA’s expiry threatens to further entrench African economies’ reliance on raw commodity exports rather than diversified, value-added manufacturing — the exact pattern AfCFTA was designed to break (UNCTAD, 2025a).

What would genuinely unlock the single market? The evidence points to a fairly specific policy agenda rather than a vague call for “more integration”:

None of this is fast or glamorous work. But the data suggest it is the right work: AfCFTA’s architecture — tariff preferences, a functioning payment system, an emerging digital trade framework — is largely in place. What is missing is the unglamorous follow-through of ratification, publication, and enforcement at the national level. With AGOA gone and global trade fragmenting along geopolitical lines, closing that gap has moved from a long-term aspiration to a much shorter-term economic necessity.

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