Africa Has the Size of a Giant. It Does Not Yet Have the Strength.

By Danilo Desiderio

The World Trade Organization’s 2026 Annual Report paints a picture of a global trading system that is bending but not breaking. Trade keeps growing, especially in services and digital commerce. But geopolitical fragmentation, supply-chain realignment and mounting policy uncertainty are quietly rewriting the rules of competition for every economy on earth.

For Africa, the report is not really a story about the outside world. It is a mirror held up to an internal problem the continent has been circling for years: Africa has market size. It does not yet have economic scale. And in global trade, that distinction is everything.

A Market Bigger Than Its Borders

As we argued in a recent LSE Africa article, economic activity across Africa is increasingly borderless in practice, even though the institutions meant to govern it remain stubbornly national. Traders, entrepreneurs and firms move across the continent through informal and formal networks alike. But at nearly every crossing, they run into a wall of customs procedures, permits, product standards, tax regimes, paperwork and enforcement systems that were built for a different era – one in which economies were meant to stop at the border, not flow across it.

Africa’s booming informal trade sector is not a footnote to this story. It is the clearest evidence of it: a symptom of markets that have outgrown the institutions built to regulate them.

AfCFTA: The Framework, Not the Finish Line

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) was designed to answer exactly this problem, offering the legal architecture for a single market spanning 54 countries. That is a landmark achievement. But a treaty is not a marketplace, and a framework is not a function.

The real work now is translating that legal foundation into a market that actually operates as one – where customs authorities exchange data instead of duplicating it, where product standards are mutually recognized rather than re-certified at every border, where payments clear efficiently across currencies, and where transport corridors connect producers to consumers at a cost that does not erase the advantage of scale in the first place.

This is the next frontier of African integration: not agreeing to a continental market, but building one that works.

Why the WTO Report Raises the Stakes

The WTO’s findings sharpen the urgency of this task. In a global economy increasingly organized around large trading blocs and tightly managed supply chains, individual African economies negotiating alone are structurally outmatched. Scale, in today’s trading system, is not a luxury. It is a prerequisite for leverage.

The answer is not retreat from global markets – Africa cannot afford to turn inward. The answer is to make Africa’s internal market powerful enough to function as a launchpad: a platform from which African firms can achieve real scale before they compete on the global stage.

Seen this way, the WTO and the AfCFTA are not competing projects but complementary ones. The WTO writes the rules of the global game. The AfCFTA builds the field on which African economies can finally play as one team rather than 54 separate contestants. What connects the two – what turns potential into power – is functional integration: the unglamorous, unfinished work of aligning customs systems, digital infrastructure, payment rails, regulatory standards and physical transport networks across borders.

The Real Test of Integration

This, ultimately, is the test African integration must pass. The continent has built the framework for a single market. What remains is to make that market concrete — to progressively dismantle the frictions that still separate 54 national economies from one continental one.

Success will not be measured by treaties signed or summits held. It will be measured by something far more tangible: whether goods, services, capital and businesses can move across Africa with meaningfully less friction than they do today. That is how market size becomes economic force.

Africa has the size of a giant. It does not yet have the strength. Closing that gap is the defining economic project of the continent’s next decade.

Danilo Desiderio serves as the CEO of Desiderio Consultants Ltd in Nairobi, Kenya, specializing in African customs, trade, and transport policies and is a senior associate to the Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute (HESPI).