Opinion
OPINION : Trade and Industrialisation The AfCFTA @ Five
By Prof Adesoji Adesugba
Africa’s free trade promise will be won or lost on the factory floor
The continental market exists on paper.
Five years after the African Continental Free Trade Area opened for business, it is worth asking a blunt question: what has actually changed for the woman shipping processed foods across a West African border, or the young manufacturer trying to sell into the country next door?
For most of them, the honest answer is: not much. And that gap, between a historic agreement signed with great ceremony and the everyday experience of doing business, is the single most important thing the continent’s trade ministers, and their partners, should be losing sleep over.
Let me be clear about the scale of what is at stake, because it is genuinely enormous. The AfCFTA joins fifty four economies and 1.4 billion people into the largest single market in the world by membership. The World Bank has estimated that, fully implemented, it could raise continental income by hundreds of billions of dollars and lift tens of millions of people out of poverty within a decade. Tellingly, the Bank found that the biggest gains come not from scrapping tariffs, but from cutting the everyday costs of moving goods across borders.
That last point deserves to be shouted from the rooftops. Because it tells us exactly where the work lies, and it is not where most of the headlines have been.
The test of this agreement is not how many protocols we sign. It is whether a container moves faster, and a firm pays less, to cross a border this year than it did last year.
Consider the starting point. Intra-African trade still hovers at around 15 per cent of the continent’s commerce. In Asia the figure is close to 60 per cent, and in the European Union, more than two thirds.
West Africa, in plain terms, still trades more with the rest of the world than with itself, selling raw materials outward and buying back finished goods we are perfectly capable of making here.
Why? Not, mainly, because of tariffs. The real wall is the one you cannot see on a customs schedule. One widely cited World Bank estimate puts the cost of non tariff barriers between African states at the equivalent of a 292 per cent tariff. Road transport alone can account for nearly a third of the price of goods traded within Africa, against roughly 7 per cent for goods traded outside it. A three day delay at a border post routinely costs a trader more than the duty the AfCFTA was designed to remove.
So when we celebrate a zero tariff while the goods sit for a week and change hands at four checkpoints, we are celebrating the wrong thing. Firms do not need ceremony. They need lower costs, faster movement, simpler access, and above all, predictability. A business can plan around a known cost. It cannot plan around a surprise.
Governments sign trade deals. Businesses are the ones that actually trade. This is the truth too often lost in the communiques. A trade agreement is a promise between states, but it is kept, or quietly broken, by thousands of private decisions: to invest in a new line, to source a part from a neighbour instead of from overseas, to risk selling into an unfamiliar market. No ministry takes those decisions. Companies do.
Which is why the private sector cannot be treated as a guest to be consulted once the real choices have been made.
Through networks of national chambers of commerce, much of the unglamorous work that makes a trade deal real can be done: explaining to firms, in plain language, what their new rights and obligations are, flagging the barriers that show up in practice, in real time, and connecting a producer in one country to a buyer in another.
The machinery to deliver this agreement already exists. It simply needs to be plugged in.
There are encouraging signs.
The Secretariat’s Guided Trade Initiative, the pilot that first tested whether goods could actually move under the new rules, was judged to have met its objectives and was wound up in 2025, with real shipments now flowing between member states. Intra African trade rebounded by double digits in 2024.
These are not trivial. But a successful pilot is a promise, not yet a habit. The task now is to turn the exception into the rule for the ordinary trader.
A trade deal that does not build industry will simply move other people’s goods more efficiently. Here is the deeper point. Opening borders without building the capacity to produce does not create prosperity, it just redistributes imports. A market of 1.4 billion consumers is only an opportunity for those with something competitive to sell into it. Integration, rightly understood, is an industrial project, not merely a tariff one.
I have seen what deliberate industrial policy can do. In my years leading Nigeria’s export processing zones, I watched how investment facilitation, industrial clusters and special economic zones could pull in capital, accelerate manufacturing and lift export competitiveness, when they were designed with care. The evidence elsewhere echoes it, from Morocco’s own Tanger Med automotive hub to Ethiopia’s textile parks. Zones do not succeed automatically, many have disappointed. But where market access, infrastructure and incentives are combined on purpose, they work.
The sectors where made in West Africa can become commercially credible are not a mystery.
Agribusiness and food processing.
Pharmaceuticals, a continent that still imports the overwhelming majority of its medicines learned the cost of that dependence the hard way during the pandemic. Textiles and light manufacturing. And the green industries of the coming decade. These are the places where regional demand, real capability and the agreement’s own rules of origin line up. That is where we should start.
None of it works, though, if the goods cannot move.
Connectivity is the binding constraint on everything else, the corridors, ports, rail and border posts, yes, but also the digital plumbing: single windows, electronic certificates of origin, customs systems that let a shipment be cleared once and then travel freely rather than being inspected at every internal frontier. The private sector is ready to help finance and run this. What it needs is a framework predictable enough to justify a long term bet.
The framework is built. The transformation is not. West Africa has what most regions can only envy: the market, the resources, a young and restless population, and a demographic wave that will define this century.
The AfCFTA gives us the framework. ECOWAS gives us the platform. Governments give us the policy. But it is the private sector that supplies the investment, the innovation and the jobs that turn a market into a living for a family.
So let this not become one more agreement we admire in conference halls. Let it become an industrial transformation we actually deliver, measured, in the end, not by the documents we ratify, but by competitive firms, decent jobs and shared prosperity for ordinary West Africans. The framework is finished. The real work is only beginning. And business is ready to roll up its sleeves, if we are finally invited to the table where it gets done.
Prof. Adesoji Adesugba is First Deputy President of the Abuja Chamber of Commerce and Industry and a development economist specialising in trade and investment promotion. The views expressed are his own.