The African Export-Import Bank has warned that Africa’s failure to trade effectively within itself stems largely from poor market intelligence, weak connectivity and the absence of structured trade platforms.
The Executive Vice President, Intra-African Trade and Export Development at Afreximbank, Kanayo Awani, said at the Nigeria for the Intra-African Trade Fair 2025 Business Roadshow on Monday in Lagos, that the continent’s trade had been stunted due to the continued inability to build stable platforms.
“Africans were not trading with one another, not because of a lack of will, but because of a lack of market intelligence, connectivity, and structured platforms,” she said.
Acording to her, these trade gaps are a direct result of colonial-era trade patterns that hardwired African economies to depend on external markets for goods the continent could supply.
“Historically, our trade patterns and trade rules were hardwired to the art world, to Europe for machinery, to Asia for textiles, to the Americas for food, and to everywhere in the world we imported from, whatever, wherever, and we ignored what we had at home. A Ghanaian shoemaker would look to Argentina for leather while Nigeria, Ethiopia, and Burundi overflow with hides,” She said.
She noted that West Africa spends $3bn annually importing meat from as far as Australia, despite livestock abundance in Chad, South Sudan, Botswana, Mali and Nigeria.
She maintained that the time has come for the continent to shift from such external dependencies and embrace internal trade opportunities under the African Continental Free Trade Area.
“We must urgently turn inward, deepen our integration and build resilient regional value chains that serve African needs with African solutions,” Awani asserted. “Intra-African trade is no longer a diplomatic aspect. It is an imperative for survival, recovery, and long-term prosperity.”
Afreximbank is a promoter of the upcoming IATF 2025 held in Algeria from September 4-10. It emphasised the role of intra-African trade platforms such as the AFCFTA.
Awani stressed the need for an “Africa-first mentality” to replace what she described as a history of fragmentation deliberately engineered by colonial powers. “It was a deliberate spiralling of colonialism to ensure that Africans would not trade with each other… a strategy that reduced African economic policy to gathering crops and bartering them,” she added.
Local media reports on Tuesday quoted the Afreximbank’s VP as saying the IATF as a key mechanism to reverse this trend by creating a continental marketplace that links African producers, buyers, investors, and entrepreneurs.
“We are bridging critical market and information gaps… connecting buyers and sellers, venture capitalists to ventures, and opening access to new markets,” she declared.
GIK/APA