Africa’s Free-Trade Dream Needs a Peace Dividend: Why AfCFTA Must Fund Conflict Research

By Fidel Amakye Owusu

When the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) opened for business in January 2021, it was hailed as a generational achievement. Economists who had spent decades arguing for a single African market finally saw their vision take legal form: a bloc spanning 54 countries and more than a billion people, with the potential to lift tens of millions out of poverty and reshape the continent’s place in the global economy.

Four years on, that optimism has collided with an uncomfortable reality. AfCFTA was born into a continent where old conflicts are hardening and new ones are multiplying – and the free-trade project has yet to reckon with what that means for its own survival.

Continent at War with Its Potential

Violent extremism is no longer confined to a handful of trouble spots. It now stretches from North Africa through the Sahel and the Lake Chad basin to the Horn of Africa and Mozambique’s gas-rich north. In the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, the M23 rebellion and a constellation of armed groups have escalated an already brutal conflict. Ethiopia, the Central African Republic, South Sudan, and now Sudan itself are each wrestling with domestic strife that has cost thousands of lives and displaced millions more.

The African Union’s Peace and Security Architecture – its Peace and Security Council and Early Warning System – was designed precisely to anticipate and defuse crises like these. Yet by almost any measure, it has struggled to keep pace with the scale and speed of the continent’s security deterioration.

This should worry AfCFTA’s architects as much as it worries diplomats. A trade bloc cannot function if the roads, borders, and markets it depends on are contested territory.

Conflict as a Trade Variable

It is well established that conflict discourages trade. What is less appreciated is how distinctly African conflicts are shaped to disrupt commerce specifically, which is exactly why AfCFTA needs dedicated research into their mechanics rather than generic risk assessments borrowed from elsewhere.

Consider three patterns that ought to concern every AfCFTA policymaker:

Resource-rich regions are conflict magnets. Many of the continent’s most valuable mineral and agricultural resources sit in areas destabilized by fighting, from Congo’s cobalt belt to gold-mining regions across the Sahel. When these areas cannot be safely developed or accessed, the raw material base that AfCFTA was meant to help process and trade regionally simply stays locked in the ground.

Border regions are where extremism concentrates – and where overland trade dies with it. The tri-border area linking Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger; the frontier between Burkina Faso and coastal West African states; the Mozambique – Tanzania border; and the multinational Lake Chad basin shared by Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and Cameroon are all significant extremist strongholds. These are not peripheral zones. They sit astride the overland trade corridors that AfCFTA is counting on to connect landlocked economies to regional markets. When militants control or terrorize a border crossing, that corridor closes, and the local economies built around it collapse with it.

Infrastructure becomes a target, not just a casualty. Roads, bridges, power lines, and rail links are the physical skeleton of any trade agreement. In conflict zones, they are also strategic targets. Sabotage does not just delay a single project; it discourages the private investment needed to build the next one.

There is a fourth cost that rarely makes it into trade-policy briefings: opportunity cost. Governments fighting insurgencies divert scarce fiscal resources toward arms and security rather than the roads, customs infrastructure, and industrial capacity that make free trade real on the ground. Every dollar spent defending a border is a dollar not spent connecting it to a market.

Elections Add Layer of Uncertainty

Conflict is not the only variable clouding the horizon. Electoral cycles across the continent carry their own risks for trade and investment planning, and the coming eighteen months will test several of them.

In Guinea-Bissau, presidential elections scheduled for December are likely to proceed, though the degree of opposition participation and the perceived legitimacy of the process will shape whether the result is broadly accepted. In Nigeria, the 2027 general election is expected to go ahead on schedule despite rising insecurity, with security conditions likely to influence campaigning and turnout in affected regions. In Somalia, elections proposed for roughly seven months from now face a real risk of delay, as fighting in Baidoa and unresolved tensions between the federal government and its regional states continue to complicate an already fragile political landscape.

None of these situations is catastrophic in isolation. Together, they illustrate a broader truth: political uncertainty and armed conflict are not background risks that trade policymakers can leave to security agencies. They are structural variables that determine whether AfCFTA’s promises reach the ground.

From Free Trade to Safe Trade

I made this argument three years ago: for AfCFTA to succeed, free trade must become safe trade. Progress since then has been limited.

That has to change. AfCFTA’s secretariat and its member states should treat conflict research as core infrastructure, not an afterthought. That means funding dedicated units that map how violence intersects with trade corridors, resource zones, and border economies; sharing that intelligence with the AU’s existing early-warning mechanisms rather than duplicating them; and building conflict sensitivity directly into infrastructure financing decisions, so that projects in high-risk corridors come with security and resilience plans attached, not just blueprints.

The continent does not lack ambition. It has already built the legal architecture for the world’s largest free-trade area by number of countries. What it has not yet built is the analytical capacity to understand where that architecture is most likely to fail – and to act before it does.

Africa cannot trade its way out of conflict. But it can, and must, research its way into a trade regime that survives contact with reality.

Fidel Amakye Owusu is an International Relations and Security Analyst. He is an Associate at the Conflict Research Consortium for Africa and has previously hosted an International Affairs program with the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC). He is passionate about Diplomacy and realizing Africa’s global potential and how the continent should be viewed as part of the global collective.