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China-Africa Trade Information Service
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China-Africa Trade Information Service
Africa traded more with itself in 2025 than with any partner bloc except Asia and the European Union, according to the African Trade Heatmaps 2026, published in mid-June by Afreximbank, the Cairo-based African Export-Import Bank. The continent ranked as its own third-largest trading partner, ahead of the Americas, the Middle East and the Gulf — a result that chips away at the familiar claim that African economies do little business with one another.
The qualifier matters. Afreximbank's figures capture only trade logged by official statistics, and a large share of commerce between neighbouring countries moves along long-established corridors inside regional borders without ever being declared. The African Union estimates that such unrecorded flows may account for up to 60% of intra-African trade. The real volume of goods crossing the continent's borders is therefore higher than the headline numbers suggest — and so, by extension, is Africa's standing among its own trading partners.
Behind the aggregate sit clear leaders. South Africa, the continent's most industrialised economy, accounts for the largest volume of trade with the rest of Africa. Measured as a share of their own commerce, however, the most integrated economies are smaller ones, namely Lesotho, Eswatini and Botswana, alongside Mali, Namibia and Djibouti, which route most of their trade through the continent, usually with a single immediate neighbour. Most of the southern group is tied to South Africa through the Southern African Customs Union, the world's oldest such arrangement. At the regional level, Southern and West Africa are the most integrated, with the bulk of their trade taking place within their own regions. Central Africa is the outlier: with only about 11.7% of its trade being intra-regional, it has the most ground to make up.
The progress is real, but the scale of the challenge ahead is harder to ignore. Africa's total trade is worth roughly $1.47 trillion in 2025. Intra-African commerce accounts for about $214 billion, or 15% of the total. That is far below the roughly 60% intra-continental trade share in Asia and the nearly 70% in Europe. Raising Africa's intra-continental trade share will require replacing at least some of the demand currently met by suppliers in Asia and Europe. The challenge is fundamentally structural.
Africa's export base is still built on natural resources — oil, gas and minerals — and, for a minority of countries, manufactured goods. Those flows are typically pointed at a single destination. China is the continent's largest trading partner by a wide margin, with resource corridors such as DR Congo-China and Angola-China each running into tens of billions of dollars a year, and several countries depend on one big buyer for most of their sales. That concentration leaves exporters exposed: a downturn in demand or a drop in commodity prices in one client market feeds straight through to national revenues, with little to cushion the blow.
The cost of that dependence is not only macroeconomic. Each shipment of finished goods bought abroad also represents manufacturing jobs created elsewhere — precisely the kind of work that a continent with the world's youngest population needs most.
The appetite to buy exists; what lags is the capacity to produce. The African Development Bank makes this point in its African Industrialisation Index 2025, compiled with the African Union and the UN Industrial Development Organisation. The special economic zones, meant to manufacture goods locally — more than 230 of them across 43 countries — are operating well below their potential. A survey of 39 such zones by the UN Conference on Trade and Development found that barely 15% operate at full capacity. With too little made on the continent, Africa imports the rest: its purchases of manufactured and medium- to high-tech goods topped $500 billion in 2023, roughly half of all its imports.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is meant to change that calculus. By lowering tariffs between African states, it can encourage regional value chains and loosen the continent's reliance on outside markets; the UN Economic Commission for Africa projects intra-African trade could rise more than 400% by 2045 if the deal is fully implemented. But it is advancing slowly.
Most countries have ratified the agreement, yet negotiations remain snagged on sectors such as automobiles and textiles, and implementation is uneven from one country to the next. More fundamental are the arteries meant to connect the continent — roads, ports, trade corridors and customs systems — which remain fragile and costly to use. It is on that front, more than on tariffs alone, that Africa will decide whether it can one day trade with itself as much as it trades with the rest of the world.
