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This article was produced with the support of UN ECA
Africa needs to find ways to better leverage its strengths, such as a young and growing population and its wealth of natural resources, to enable it to better offset the challenges presented by global headwinds.
As well as concerns about increasing trade restrictions and supply chain disruptions globally, Africa faces a raft of internal challenges and sluggish growth, said Hanan Morsy, Deputy Executive Secretary (Programmes) and Chief Economist of the ECA at the opening session of CoM2025.
But the continent’s strengths, which include the opportunity to leapfrog over legacy challenges with technology, position it well to create sustainable and inclusive development.
Currently, progress in increasing intra-African trade relative to total trade has been limited at about 15.8%, substantially less than other regions.
But on the upside, the profile of trade within the continent is more positive than global trade, with a higher level of manufactured exports at 46% compared to 24% of value-added goods (2019-2023) as a percentage of trade with the rest of the world.
The latter remains rooted in commodities with just two product segments forming more than 52% of Africa’s total trade – fuel as well as ore and metals.
But the profile of intra-African trade “tells us that there are huge opportunities to leverage trade among ourselves to create jobs with higher wages as we move up the value chain and create a better quality of growth”.
Deeper integration, alongside greater industrialisation, could produce many positive outcomes such as increasing intra-African trade by 45%, the continent’s GDP by 1.2%, exports by 7.3% and imports by 6.9%.
Simply reducing restrictive regulations could lead to a 21.5% increase in intra-African digital trade, she said.
Another game changer in African development is the growth of pan-African payment systems, which could potentially save $5bn in the cost of trade and alleviate foreign exchange issues by enabling trade in local currencies.
African development finance institutions need to be well capitalised to support trade, she added.
Delegates, in question time, called for eradication of non-tariff barriers and illegal trade practices and dumping. The lack of mainstreaming of technology was raised as well as a question about how to strengthen capital markets.
