- August 17, 2026
- Posted by: AITCR 3
- Category: News
‘Africa is outperforming the world on growth, but still capturing only a sliver of the opportunity in front of it.‘ – This is the core message from the African Trade Report published by the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank). The 2026 edition, themed “Leveraging Geopolitics for Trade and Industrialisation in Global Africa,” lands at a moment when global trade is fracturing along geopolitical lines.
Africa is growing faster than almost anyone else
While global GDP growth slowed to 3.4% in 2025 and is projected to ease further to 3.1% in 2026, Africa’s real GDP growth accelerated from 3.4% to 4.5% over the same period, comfortably outpacing the global average. Inflation across the continent also fell sharply, from 21.6% to 13.1%, as tighter monetary policy and improving food supply conditions took hold. Egypt, Nigeria, and South Africa led this performance, with industrial manufacturing, tourism, and stronger oil output doing much of the heavy lifting.
Trade told a similar story. Africa’s merchandise trade grew by 6.1% to roughly $1.5 trillion in 2025, merchandise exports rose 6.2% to $685 billion, while imports grew 6% to $781.5 billion. Intra-African trade specifically climbed 5.5% to $213.8 billion, helped by strong growth from Ethiopia, Uganda, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and Zambia.
The uncomfortable numbers underneath the good news
For all the momentum, the report is candid about what is still holding Africa back:
- A stubborn trade finance gap. The shortfall in trade finance available to African exporters and importers held at roughly $74 billion in 2025, a gap driven by thin foreign exchange liquidity and shrinking correspondent banking relationships that continues to limit exporters’ ability to secure financing they’ve already earned the right to.
- Africa is still a marginal player in global trade. Despite the growth, the continent’s share of global trade sits at just 3.1%, a modest improvement on 2024’s 2.9%, but nowhere near proportionate to Africa’s population or resource base.
- Intra-African trade is still low relative to other regions. Even at $213.8 billion, intra-African trade remains a small fraction of the continent’s total trade, underlining how much of Africa’s commerce still flows outward rather than across its own borders.
As Afreximbank’s Group Chief Economist, Dr Yemi Kale, put it, Africa stands at a critical juncture, one where geopolitical fragmentation is as much an opportunity as it is a threat.
AfCFTA: from paperwork to practice
The report tracks real, if uneven, progress on the African Continental Free Trade Area. As of mid-2025, 49 of 54 African Union member states had ratified the agreement, and the AfCFTA Guided Trade Initiative, the mechanism used to test real preferential trade before full rollout, expanded from its original pilot group to more than 39 participating countries. Nigeria gazetted its Provisional Schedule of Tariff Concessions in April, formally qualifying Nigerian goods for preferential tariffs across AfCFTA member states.
Still, only 17 countries have submitted full tariff schedules covering every category, and rules-of-origin negotiations remain unresolved in sensitive sectors like textiles and automotive, sectors where Egypt, Morocco, and South Africa have the most to gain from getting the details right.
Why the reciprocal tariffs matter less than they seem to
A notable thread in this year’s report: the wave of US reciprocal tariffs imposed on African economies in 2025, some as high as 50%, turned out to have limited aggregate impact, simply because US-Africa trade is a small share of Africa’s total merchandise trade (about 5.1% in 2025). But the report is clear that this is exactly the moment for Africa to lean harder into South-South trade and BRICS partnerships rather than treat the tariffs as a one-off shock to absorb and move on from. Nigeria’s own trade with BRICS countries in Q1 2025 (about $3.54 billion) already dwarfed its trade with the United States (about $1.01 billion) over the same period, a trend line worth watching.
What this means for AITCR’s work
This report is essentially a data-backed case for everything AITCR has been advocating: that AfCFTA implementation, regional value chain development, and closing the trade finance gap aren’t abstract policy goals, they’re the difference between Africa capturing the value of its own growth or continuing to export it elsewhere. For Nigerian and African businesses specifically, the practical takeaways are:
- The trade finance gap is a real, addressable constraint, businesses exporting within Africa should be exploring instruments like Afreximbank’s trade credit guarantees and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), which reduces reliance on hard currency and cuts transaction costs.
- AfCFTA preferential tariffs are now operational, not theoretical, for businesses trading with countries that have gazetted their schedules, this is worth checking against your specific trade partners.
- Diversifying beyond traditional Western markets is no longer just a resilience strategy, the data suggests it’s where the growth increasingly is.
Want help figuring out what AfCFTA implementation or Afreximbank’s trade finance instruments mean for your specific sector? Get in touch with us. africainternationaltrade.com
Source: African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank), African Trade Report 2026: Leveraging Geopolitics for Trade and Industrialisation in Global Africa, June 2026.
