From Raw Materials to Real Value: How AfCFTA Can Finally Build Africa's Continental Value Chains

Africa grows the beans but buys the bars. Cote d'Ivoire and Ghana together produce nearly two-thirds of the world's cocoa, according to the USDA's 2025 Cocoa Sector Overview, yet the chocolate those beans become is overwhelmingly manufactured in Europe and sold back to African consumers at a tidy mark-up.

This is not a quirk of the market or a misfortune of geography. It is the structural inheritance of an economic order designed, quite deliberately, to keep Africa as a supplier of raw inputs rather than a maker of finished goods. AfCFTA's central promise is to change that arrangement. The question worth asking honestly is whether it has the architecture, and the political nerve, to actually do it.

The scale of the problem is worth sitting with for a moment. A 2024 report on the Economy of Africa notes that 90% of the continent's production exports remain unprocessed goods, while Africa's share of global GDP has stagnated at 3.1% for two decades, even as its population has grown to represent 18% of the world's total. Intra-African trade stood at just 15% of the continent's total trade in 2023, per Afreximbank's African Trade Report 2024, against 55% in Asia and over 70% in Europe. That gap between demographic weight and economic output is not a gap in potential. It is a gap in structure, and structure can be changed.

Sceptics of AfCFTA's industrialisation agenda have a point that deserves a proper hearing rather than a polite dismissal. Africa has tried this before. Post-independence governments built factories, established state enterprises, and announced import substitution strategies with great fanfare. Many failed, not because industrialisation was the wrong goal, but because the conditions were not in place: infrastructure was inadequate, institutions were fragile, and markets were simply too small to sustain scale. Critics who raise this history are not being obstructionist. What they miss, however, is that three of those conditions have genuinely shifted. Digital platforms have collapsed the cost of cross-border coordination. AfCFTA has created a single market of 1.7 billion people, large enough to make continental-scale manufacturing viable. And global supply chain diversification, accelerated sharply by the disruptions of the past five years, means international buyers are actively looking for alternatives to concentrated manufacturing in Asia. For once, Africa's moment is not self-declared. It is confirmed by external demand.

Infrastructure costs remain the most honest argument against easy optimism. A 2024 UNCTAD report on Economic Development in Africa found that trade costs on the continent run 50% above the global average, with road transport alone accounting for 29% of the price of goods traded internally, compared to 7% for goods traded beyond Africa's borders. Afreximbank data shows that intra-African trade grew 12.4% to $220.3 billion in 2024, which is genuinely encouraging. Yet Africa's share of global exports still slipped from 3.5% in 2009 to 3.3% in 2024. Growing within a shrinking share is not a transformation. It is running rather energetically to stand still.

The skills challenge is equally real and equally solvable, which is a combination that often gets lost in policy discussions. Up to 12 million young Africans enter the labour market every year, per World Bank data, against roughly 3 million formal jobs created. Continental value chains in cocoa processing, battery assembly, textiles, and pharmaceuticals could absorb that labour productively, but only if accompanied by serious investment in technical education. Rwanda offers a useful, if partial, illustration: simultaneous investment in industrial policy and skills development has produced one of the continent's highest mobile money inclusion scores and a growing startup ecosystem. Rwanda is not a template; its scale and political context are too specific for that. It is, however, proof that policy coherence produces results, which is more useful than a template.

Women deserve more than a paragraph in this conversation, though a paragraph is what space allows. They perform approximately 70% of the labour on cocoa farms across West Africa, yet receive around 20% of the income. They dominate informal cross-border trade across the continent. Any value chain strategy that does not explicitly address the barriers women face, including access to land titles, credit, and formal market participation, will reproduce the very inequity it claims to be moving beyond. The World Bank projects that full AfCFTA implementation could raise women's wages by 10.5% by 2035, faster than men's. That outcome is not automatic. It requires deliberate design, and deliberate design requires someone to insist on it loudly enough that it actually happens.

The prize, if AfCFTA's value chain agenda is implemented with genuine seriousness, is a fundamental shift in Africa's position in the global economy. The World Bank estimates the agreement could boost Africa's income by $450 billion, a 7% gain, by 2035, with intra-African exports potentially increasing by 81%, led by manufactured goods. By 2050, Africa's working-age population will have grown by 740 million people, the largest such increase of any region on earth. Those people will either be employed making things, or they will not be employed. The continent does not have the luxury of treating value chain development as an aspirational agenda item to be revisited at the next summit. It is the central economic challenge of the next generation; AfCFTA is the best available instrument to meet it, and imperfect and incomplete as it undoubtedly is, it is also indispensable.

Bibiogragphy

1. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (2025). Cote d'Ivoire -- Cocoa Sector Overview 2025. https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/

2. USDA Foreign Agricultural Service (2025). Ghana -- Cocoa Sector Overview 2025. https://apps.fas.usda.gov/newgainapi/

3. Wikipedia / Economy of Africa (citing 2024 data). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Africa

4. Afreximbank (2024). African Trade Report 2024: Climate Implications of the AfCFTA Implementation. https://media.afreximbank.com/afrexim/African-Trade-Report_2024.pdf

5. UNCTAD (2025, February). Economic Development in Africa Report 2024: Unlocking Africa's trade potential. https://unctad.org/publication/economic-development-africa-report-2024

6. Afreximbank (2025, June). Africa's trade grows 13.9% in 2024 [via Ecofin Agency]. https://www.ecofinagency.com/finance/2706-47457-africa-s-trade-grows-13-9-in-2024-driven-by-afcfta-progress

7. OAMarkets / Afreximbank (2025). Intra-African trade 2024: gains ground across the continent. https://www.oamarkets.com/articles/intra-african-trade-revolution-2024/

8. World Bank (2024). Sub-Saharan Africa overview -- working-age population projections. https://www.worldbank.org/ext/en/region/afr

9. GSMA (2025). State of the Industry Report on Mobile Money 2025. https://www.gsma.com/sotir/

10. World Bank (2020, July 27). Trade pact could boost Africa's income by $450 billion. https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/press-release/2020/07/27/african-continental-free-trade-area

11. Brookings Institution (2025, January). Intra-African trade and its potential to accelerate progress toward the SDGs. https://www.brookings.edu/articles/intra-african-trade-and-its-potential-to-accelerate-progress-toward-the-sdgs/

12. Trade Unions in AfCFTA (2025). A five-year review of the AfCFTA through a trade union lens. https://tradeunionsinafcfta.org/a-five-year-review-of-the-afcfta-through-a-trade-union-lens/

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