In 2026, Libya seems poised for a new interim authority, facilitated through US mediation between the families of between the families of Khalifa Haftar, the eastern-based military strongman, and Abdul Hamid Dbeibeh, the head of the Tripoli-based Government of National Unity. It remains unclear how capable any new arrangements will be of advancing the settlement process, raising questions about the underlying philosophy of the international community in dealing with transitional authorities in Libya. which, unlike democratic governments, are temporary and limited in mandate.

Five-year cycles

Since the ousting of Muammar Gaddafi in 2011, there has been a power vacuum at the top of the Libyan state. This has frequently led to violent conflict, including a six-year civil war from 2014 to 2020.

Three different approaches have been tested to build a unified transitional authority. The first approach emerged in September 2011. It adopted an optimistic electoral democratic solution and had two milestones of success: the election of the General National Congress in 2012, and the election of the House of Representatives in 2014, alongside the selection of the Constitutional Drafting Assembly. However, the electoral solution failed to produce unified authorities, leaving the country divided into competing political and military camps in eastern and western Libya—a division that continues to shape Libyan political interactions today.

This led to a second approach, which aimed to build a consensual authority through negotiations among divided elites. This resulted in the government of Fayez al-Sarraj, which lasted five years until February 2021. During this period, which encompassed the civil war, the country experienced the Battle of Tripoli, which saw the fiercest fighting since Gaddafi’s ousting. This prompted the experimentation with a new hybrid approach that combined elements of election and consensus, whereby new authorities were elected through a restricted vote among a narrow elite—the members of the Libyan Political Dialogue Forum (LPDF). Membership was determined under UN auspices to include representatives of key political and social groups. By introducing a voting mechanism within a controlled setting, this approach encouraged the formation of cross-divisional alliances that could overcome entrenched political and military cleavages, an outcome that purely negotiated elite agreements had struggled to achieve.

The new authorities were able to maintain a unified government before division resurfaced in September 2021, with competing political and military centres re-emerging in eastern and western Libya along lines similar to the previous institutional and territorial splits. With the completion of five years under the Dbeibeh government, which emerged from the LPDF’s hybrid mechanism and continues to enjoy international recognition, new US-sponsored attempts are underway to build a new unified authority.

All these approaches had UN supervision but ultimately failed to create a national consensus. Divisions quickly reasserted themselves weeks or months after the formation of the political authority. International recognition, rather than domestic legitimacy, ultimately becomes the decisive factor in favouring one government over another. With this came access to state coffers and the ability to buy loyalties and secure the support of powerful militias in the capital.

The fourth cycle?

There are renewed efforts by the US to form a new unified authority to end the chronic division. There have been meetings in Rome (September 2025) and Paris (January 2026) between Saddam Haftar and Ibrahim Dbeibeh, attended by US envoy Masad Pauls.

Compared to previous approaches, several differences stand out. Firstly, the current attempt is being led by the US rather than under the UN umbrella. This reflects the bilateral deal-based diplomacy characteristic of Trump’s foreign policy. Procedurally, the US vision simplifies the division between the Haftar and Dbeibeh families, who control key levers of power in the east and west. Previous approaches sought to engage the general populace through elections or included political elites and community representatives. Substantively, the US approach is linked to direct negotiation over management of Libya’s oil reserves and the country’s financial challenges.

These differences have potential implications for governance rules and their relation to the settlement process. The anticipated authority is expected to combine economic resources, security and military control, and international recognition—a governance model unprecedented in post-2011 Libya, as these elements were previously divided between the two main camps of the conflict and had never been consolidated under a single authority. While this model may provide continuity factors, it faces significant obstacles.

UN-sponsored attempts at forming a unified government were historically tied to a broader settlement agenda, aiming toward general elections reflecting the popular will and a permanent constitution. Ending the division was merely an initial step. In contrast, US initiatives focus on establishing a stable authority, often without concern for constitutional or electoral issues, raising questions about how sustainable they will be in the long term, or how much benefit it will bring to the Libyan people.

Diversity or discontinuity

Experimenting with new approaches to building a transitional authority raises a vital question: Is the aim to find a more efficient approach whenever one fails, or does continuous experimentation hinder the accumulation and consolidation of clear governance rules?

The importance of this question is heightened by the fact that each approach fails shortly after the new authority is formed. Nevertheless, the international community continues to support the transitional authority for several years before exploring a new approach. Regarding current US efforts, it is still unclear how successful the deal-based diplomacy will be in establishing a new authority.

If international mediation succeeds in creating a five-year-lasting authority, it will prompt a reassessment of the international perspective on governance in Libya, questioning whether transitional authorities are merely temporary mechanisms or if entrenching transitional governance itself is the objective, with “conflict settlement” serving only as a justification to buy time for renewed transitional authorities rather than genuinely ending the transitional phase.

Photo credit: Ziad Fhema used with permission CC BY 2.0

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In Nairobi, young Kenyan workers were hired by to label graphic content for OpenAI and Meta. They read descriptions of child sexual abuse, bestiality, murder, and suicide for between $1.32 and $2 an hour. When the contract ended, many were sent home without medical care or pending wages. Over 140 workers developed PTSD, depression, and anxiety. They have since sued Meta and petitioned Kenya’s parliament.

Was this development or exploitation?

The company is question, Sama is a San Francisco-based entity that claimed to have lifted 59,000 people out of poverty. It said it was building AI capacity in Africa, creating jobs for marginalised communities, and integrating Kenya into the global technology economy. Through that lens, the operation was development in action. But the workers received poverty level wages, psychological trauma, and were cut adrift when they were no longer useful. Through that lens, it was extractive exploitation, the opposite of development.

Consider another example. When a startup scrapes local cultural data to train a model, is that innovation or appropriation? When a government partners with a foreign tech firm for AI-driven public services, is that modernisation or dependency? When a foreign company deploys its diagnostic AI in African hospitals as a development partnership, and the patient data generated improves the company’s global product, is that technology transfer or knowledge extraction?

When a policymaker is considering a government partnership with a foreign tech firm how do you square that circle. The partnership is modernising public services but also creating dependency on foreign. It’s development, but creates problems.

The dominant frame upon which African policy makers structure governance and policy is through the concept of “development” rather than say pure economic growth, or citizens well being. But Intellectual Property (IP) policy in African countries provides the historical parallel that development is analytically broken and lacks discriminating power. Despite this precedent, African countries are continuing to use “development” to organise and guide their AI governance and policy.

The language of “development” in African AI strategies

As African countries enter AI governance negotiations, a familiar word dominates the discussion: development.  AI should serve or promote African development. The African Union’s Continental AI strategy explicitly frames its strategy as a “development-oriented” approach. Similarly, development is embedded structurally as an organising framework in the national AI policies of Kenya, Rwanda, and other African countries. Fundamentally, it means that development functions as more than an aspiration. It is the organising criterion through which policy choices are made and justified. When Nigeria’s National AI Strategy frames AI as a ‘developmental equaliser,’ this is not rhetoric— it determines how the strategy classifies actors (Google as a ‘development partner’ rather than a regulated entity), how it evaluates outcomes (AI adoption as development success regardless of who captures the value), and how it resolves conflicts (foreign corporate involvement is welcomed because it serves development, even when it also serves extraction). Development is the lens through which policymakers decide what counts as progress, what counts as a problem, and what counts as a partnership.

Rwanda invokes development to justify both its partnerships with foreign technology companies and its ambitions for domestic AI capacity. When these objectives collide, as they will, the organising concept of development will offer no way to choose— just as it couldn’t classify what it encountered in the Sama case.

Of course, the point is not to dismiss the company’s bad behaviour in the Sama case. But, rather, to inquire whether development can tell the policymaker whether to celebrate or intervene when a company offers AI jobs that simultaneously build local capacity and traumatise workers.

And, this failure to classify phenomena coherently is a structural feature of development that has characterised African IP Policy for decades.

The warning from intellectual property policy

Decades of IP policy in African countries has shown that development is a radically confused concept, cannot explain what it counters, and often turns compatible evidence into contradictions.

Consider the issue of piracy in developing countries where development has continued to structure IP policy. When a policymaker encounters a phenomenon— say, unauthorised textbook copying in African university towns— the first question, before evidence gathering, before policy design, is: am I looking at something to fix or something to protect? Development answers both. If your goal is a thriving publishing industry, piracy is a disease. If your goal is educated citizens, then this type of piracy is therapeutic. The concept that is supposed to guide the policymaker’s response cannot even classify what the policymaker is looking at.

The damage does not stop at classification. Development actively distorts the evidence. The piracy example again. Research shows piracy increases student access to books. Research also shows piracy decreases publisher revenue. These are compatible findings: two different effects of the same phenomenon. There is no contradiction but the moment both findings are filtered through development, the concept converts them: the first becomes “piracy promotes development” and the second becomes “piracy undermines development.” The same evidence now appears to confirm and deny the same proposition.

The same mechanism will paralyse AI policy evaluation. If African countries measure AI governance success against “development,” every data point will be ambiguous. A rise in AI adoption could mean the strategy is working (technology uptake) or failing (foreign platform dominance). A decline in foreign AI investment could mean the strategy is working (data sovereignty) or failing (isolation from global innovation). An increase in AI-generated content could mean creative flourishing or cultural displacement. Without a stable criterion for success or failure, evaluation becomes impossible.

Now, one might counter that AI governance relies on different policy instruments and institutional realities than IP legislation. This is true. IP operates through established treaty architecture; AI governance is still being built. This critique however misses the point because the problem is not the instruments or the institutional architecture. It is the concept organising them. Development structures the way we approach both domains, and it fails in both for the same reason: it cannot classify phenomena, cannot interpret evidence, and cannot adjudicate between competing goals. Different instruments, but same organising failure.

What AI policymakers should do instead

As the physicist David Deutsch proposed, good explanations are those that are hard to vary. Development fails this test entirely. A concept that can absorb any policy position without strain is not guiding decisions. It is a commitment to many fantasies. However, the alternative is not abandoning development as an aspiration. It has value and it remains indispensable for diplomatic coalition-building. But in the spaces where policy is actually designed—where legislation is drafted, where regulatory frameworks are built— development should be replaced with disaggregated, falsifiable objectives.

“Minimum wage parity between outsourced AI workers and equivalent domestic roles” specifies who is protected and how. “Development-oriented AI labour governance” does not. The first type of formulation makes distributional choices visible and negotiable. The second conceals them behind a concept that promises everything and adjudicates nothing.

African countries do not need more development-oriented frameworks. They need frameworks that can tell them what is wrong, specifically enough that they can tell whether they are fixing it. And the moment is now, as the proliferation of AI technologies will only give birth to other Samas.

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Despite being home to 18 per cent of the world’s population, Africa represents only 2.2 per cent of global air traffic. Connectivity within Africa is poor, with the fragmentation of the regulatory environment rather than a lack of demand limiting aviation growth.

For thirty years, African aviation policy debates have largely been written in the language of legal freedoms. Policymakers and regulators frequently discuss the Yamoussoukro Decision and the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) as milestones in liberalising African skies. The central idea behind these initiatives is simple: remove regulatory barriers and airlines will be able to connect African cities more easily. Yet despite these reforms, air connectivity across the continent remains limited and expensive. Much of the discussion has focused on infrastructure gaps, regulatory constraints, or airline competition. But another, less visible barrier continues to shape the reality of African aviation: the movement of money. In many cases, aircraft can cross borders more easily than the payments associated with them, and this is holding the industry back.

The payment gap

Consider the position of an airline CEO operating in an African market. Legally, their airline may have been granted new rights to operate routes across the region. In principle, this should expand the airline’s commercial opportunities. In practice, however, the financial environment may constrain those opportunities. Passengers purchase tickets in local currencies such as Nigerian naira or Kenyan shillings. Yet many of the airline’s costs are denominated in foreign currencies. Aircraft leases, maintenance contracts, insurance payments and fuel purchases are often priced in US dollars or euros. When foreign exchange shortages or currency restrictions emerge, airlines may struggle to convert their local revenues into the currencies needed to meet these obligations. In some cases, airlines accumulate significant volumes of funds that remain trapped in local currencies and cannot be repatriated.

These funds exist on company balance sheets, but they cannot be used to pay international suppliers or aircraft lessors. For airlines operating on narrow profit margins, this creates a serious financial vulnerability. Routes that appear viable on paper quickly become unsustainable in practice.

Financial infrastructure constraints also affect passengers. Air travel is increasingly organised around digital booking systems and online payment platforms. These systems are typically designed around global card networks and formal banking infrastructure. However, large segments of African economies operate through informal or semi-formal financial systems. A trader may have sufficient cash to purchase a flight ticket but lack access to an internationally recognised payment card. A student may hold funds in a mobile money wallet that cannot be used on global airline booking platforms. In these situations, the passenger’s ability to travel is constrained not by airline availability but by payment system compatibility.

At the same time, global financial compliance frameworks such as anti-money laundering and know-your-customer regulations can unintentionally exclude individuals who work in informal sectors from accessing the banking systems required for online transactions. These dynamics highlight an important gap in aviation policy. Liberalising air transport markets creates legal access to aviation networks, but it does not necessarily ensure financial access to those networks.

A missing pillar of aviation integration

African aviation liberalisation has focused primarily on regulatory integration. However, financial settlement systems remain fragmented. As a result, airlines and passengers often operate within financial environments that are poorly aligned with the global aviation payment architecture.

Some policymakers and industry stakeholders have begun exploring ways to address this challenge. One proposal involves developing regional financial settlement mechanisms capable of supporting cross-border aviation payments while reducing exposure to foreign exchange volatility. Another involves improving interoperability between airline booking systems and African digital financial platforms, particularly mobile money services that are widely used across the continent. Such initiatives recognise that financial infrastructure is becoming a critical component of aviation governance.

The UK has a role to play

The United Kingdom is well positioned to contribute to this discussion. London remains one of the most important global centres for aviation finance and dispute resolution. Many aircraft leasing agreements and aviation financing contracts are governed by English law, and disputes are frequently resolved through London-based arbitration or commercial courts. At the same time, the UK maintains extensive aviation links with Africa, with Gatwick alone connecting 16 African destinations. London is a major hub connecting African cities to global markets, and British financial institutions remain deeply involved in aviation financing.

Given this position, the UK could help support efforts aimed at improving cross-border financial settlement in aviation. This could include facilitating regulatory dialogue between financial authorities, aviation regulators and payment system providers, as well as supporting institutional innovations that improve payment interoperability between African financial systems and global aviation settlement structures. Strengthening financial infrastructure would benefit both African aviation markets and the wider ecosystem of investors, financiers and service providers involved in the sector.

Moving beyond open skies

African aviation policy has long focused on opening airspace. But improving connectivity may increasingly depend on something less visible: ensuring that money can move as efficiently as aircraft. Aircraft may cross borders in hours, but financial systems often move much more slowly. Bridging that gap may prove essential for unlocking the full potential of African aviation integration.

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The latest escalation in the Gulf is a reminder that, in the contemporary international system, geopolitical crises rarely remain confined to the regions in which they begin. They move through energy markets, shipping corridors, insurance systems, freight costs, and food supply chains before appearing elsewhere as inflationary pressure, fiscal strain, and heightened social vulnerability.

This is the context in which foreign policy must now be assessed. It is no longer enough to read major geopolitical events only through the traditional lenses of diplomacy, mediation, and political positioning. The evolving character of global risk now requires foreign-policy institutions to work in much closer alignment with economic and contingency systems, because in our increasingly globalised world, the effects of external crises can be felt in domestic markets before they are registered through formal diplomatic channels.

For Africa, and particularly for economies already managing tight fiscal space, exchange-rate pressure, and high import sensitivity, these transmission effects are neither theoretical nor distant. The IMF’s October 2025 Regional Economic Outlook for Sub-Saharan Africa makes clear that the region remains resilient, but within an external environment shaped by uneven commodity prospects, tight borrowing conditions, and a deterioration in the global trade and aid landscape.

The strategic lesson is straightforward. In a world of interconnected shocks, preparedness must include the capacity to identify how external crises may materialise domestically and to respond before market disruption hardens into broader economic and social strain. That calls for practical capabilities: anticipatory analysis, closer coordination across government, real-time monitoring of critical supply and price trends, and response instruments that are ready before a shock intensifies. The OECD’s work on strategic foresight highlights horizon scanning and scenario planning as tools governments can use to identify emerging risks, while its report on using foresight to anticipate emerging critical risks argues for embedding early-warning and forward-looking risk analysis into institutional frameworks.

Lessons from abroad learned at home

There are useful international examples of how this thinking is being operationalised. Singapore’s Economic Resilience Taskforce was established to monitor the evolving global trade environment, engage affected sectors, and coordinate targeted support measures across government, business, and labour. Serious preparedness depends on institutional coordination before a crisis becomes a domestic emergency.

For Nigeria, this period is particularly instructive. Nigeria has both a national interest and a regional responsibility in thinking carefully about how external shocks are transmitted through the economy. As an oil producer, Nigeria may appear at first glance to benefit from periods of higher crude prices. Yet the wider picture is more complex. A rise in crude prices can coincide with higher freight costs, disruption in refined-product markets, inflation pass-through, and uncertainty across wider trade channels. That is precisely why recent reporting on the Gulf shock deserves attention. It demonstrates that strategic conflict can become a multi-sector market event with implications that extend well beyond the energy sector alone.

The more useful question, then, is how countries such as Nigeria can continue to strengthen preparedness in practical terms. The answer begins not with inventing an entirely new state architecture, but with building more deliberately on institutional assets that already exist. Nigeria has already invested in trade facilitation and market intelligence, including its trade portal and the recently highlighted AfCFTA Market Intelligence Tool, which is designed to provide businesses and policymakers with data on tariffs, market trends, and trade opportunities. These assets can serve not only commercial purposes, but also wider anticipatory ones when connected more systematically to external-risk assessment.

A sensible next step would be a standing external-shock assessment mechanism at the centre of government, bringing together foreign affairs, finance, trade authorities, customs, port and maritime agencies, agriculture, emergency management, and relevant security institutions. The purpose would be to translate external crises into decision-ready domestic analysis. If a chokepoint disruption persists, what is the likely effect on freight costs, fertiliser availability, food imports, transport prices, insurance exposure, and exchange-rate pressure? In the present strategic environment, governments must be able to answer such questions quickly if they are to protect domestic stability from external turbulence.

A second step lies in making more strategic use of the data already available across government. Trade, customs, port, shipping, and market-intelligence systems can be connected more closely into an internal dashboard for monitoring freight stress, key import exposure, supply-route disruption, and emerging pressure points across food and industrial value chains. Used in this way, trade and logistics systems become part of a broader statecraft architecture, one that links diplomacy to economic resilience rather than treating them as separate domains.

A third step is to align external-risk monitoring with Nigeria’s existing emergency and food-security instruments. The National Emergency Management Agency has itself emphasised the importance of strengthening early warning and moving toward more anticipatory risk management. In parallel, Nigeria’s agricultural policy framework has long recognised the role of strategic reserves and emergency interventions in stabilising supply and responding to disruption, as reflected in the government’s Agriculture Promotion Policy framework. The strategic task now is to connect these instruments more deliberately to external-shock preparedness, so that geopolitical disruptions abroad can be assessed early against likely domestic pressure points.

There is also an important regional dimension. If shocks originating around strategic chokepoints can affect multiple West African economies in similar ways, then regional cooperation must increasingly be understood not just in political terms, but also in practical economic terms. The Economic Community of West African States has already built substantial experience in preventive diplomacy and conflict management, as reflected in its Conflict Prevention Framework. The next frontier is to complement that tradition with stronger coordination on shared economic vulnerability: monitoring shipping disruptions, tracking food-security risks, identifying essential-import exposure, and improving collective readiness for external market shocks. Nigeria is well placed to contribute meaningfully to that evolution because of its scale, institutional experience, and diplomatic weight.

The broader point is not that African states are passive victims of global crises. It is that the international environment now places a premium on anticipatory capacity. Wars and confrontations in distant arenas increasingly have immediate implications for countries far beyond them, especially through energy, trade, and food systems. For Africa, and for Nigeria in particular, this means that effective foreign policy must increasingly be understood as part of a wider national resilience strategy. Diplomatic engagement remains indispensable, but so too does the capacity to anticipate and manage the domestic consequences of external volatility.

That is the real lesson of the present Gulf crisis. In today’s world, external instability is rarely just external. The countries best prepared for it will be those that connect diplomacy, economic management, and contingency planning in ways that are timely, coordinated, and strategic.

Photo credit: Rachel Strohm used with permission CC BY-ND 2.0

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The AfCFTA is a landmark agreement for Africa: it encompasses 54 signatory countries and will establish a single continental market for goods and services, with free movement of capital and business travellers, creating a market of 1.2 billion people with a combined GDP of £2.2 trillion.

What is needed is an approach that links AfCFTA commitments to measurable outcomes and impacts, helping identify the pathways and milestones to generate the potential benefits.

What comparative evidence tells us

The underlying principle of the AfCFTA is that if State Parties implement the commitments in these protocols, Africa’s market will become seamless across seven dimensions: trade in goods, services, investments, intellectual property rights, digital trade, supporting women and youths, and dispute settlement.

To truly see the benefits of the agreement, countries must ratify and domesticate the Agreement, along with operational annexes and schedules; functioning committees and focal points; efficient customs, regulatory and digital infrastructure; and willingness to use and comply with dispute settlement rulings.

Comparative evidence from other trade agreements shows that agreements that go beyond tariffs, generate stronger trade in goods and services, value-chain and investment effects than shallower agreements. But results are much weaker when implementation is partial or when complementary reforms lag.

Dimension by dimension

Trade in Goods: Cuts in tariffs matter, but the largest gains in modern trade agreements often come from reducing procedural and regulatory frictions at and behind the border. The evidence from the Southern African Development Community shows that despite reduced tariffs, intra-regional trade has not grown as expected due to non-tariff measures, such as customs, standards and licensing requirements.

Trade in Services: For services, the comparative evidence is strong. The OECD has found that recent free trade agreements (FTAs) frequently go beyond the WTO’s General Agreement on Trade in Services commitments, removing an additional 10-40 per cent of services restrictions. However, regulatory divergences are significant for trade in services and require a more gradual alignment between the parties. Removing trade in services restrictions also boosts trade in goods due to the linkages between services and goods. For example, in manufacturing accounting, engineering, design and other services play an important role in building competitiveness. Making the supporting services seamless allows for easier trade in the goods related to them.

Investment: The evidence on the impact of investment provisions on trade flows is positive but mixed. WTO research suggests that the impact of trade and investment agreements on foreign direct investment varies across countries and institutional settings, suggesting that other factors explain the differences in investment flows.  More recent WTO research and mapping show that more than half of Regional Trade Agreements (RTAs) contain investment chapters and that these increasingly combine liberalisation and protection with language on promotion, facilitation, and sustainable investment. There appears to be evidence that deep trade agreements have sizeable, positive and statistically significant effects on both trade and Foreign Direct Investment.

Intellectual Property Rights: IP-related provisions in free trade agreements have become more common and can affect trade patterns, especially in knowledge-intensive sectors. Nevertheless, stronger language in provisions and investor dispute settlement mechanisms in FTAs does not automatically translate into innovation or technology transfer. For the AfCFTA, the implication is that legal harmonisation should be treated as an output, whereas innovation and technology diffusion should be treated as higher-order outcomes that depend on competition, skills, research capability and firm capabilities.

Competition Policy: Competition provisions are increasingly integrated into free trade agreements. Around 90 per cent of trade agreements incorporate competition provisions or chapters. Evidence indicates that competition provisions in FTAs have a significant impact on encouraging parties to adopt the necessary legal frameworks.

Digital Trade: Digital trade provisions have become steadily more detailed across RTAs, which now commonly address electronic authentication, consumer protection, personal information protection and paperless trading. Research suggests they promote digitally deliverable services, whereby additional provisions on digital trade can boost digital trade flows by roughly 2.3 per cent per provision. The OECD finds that a 0.1 per cent reduction in their domestic Digital Services Restrictiveness Index (a measure to estimate a country’s level of digital trade restrictions) score is associated with a 145 per cent increase in overall exports. The impact is highest for digitally-deliverable services, but is also high in food and agriculture and manufacturing sectors. The case is even stronger for emerging economies where the benefits of reform deliver greater export gains. For the AfCFTA, this makes the operational annexes on data, digital identity, payments and paperless trade central to the results framework.

Women and Youth in Trade: Gender-related provisions are present in a growing, but still limited number of RTAs, and many remain limited to best-endeavour language (statements of intent without obligations to act). The lack of ambition in commitments suggests that the most likely near-term outcomes from the Protocol will be small yet practical rather than structural. These will include establishing information portals, simplifying procedures to trade for women traders, provision of training and access to finance, increasing the participation of women and youth in implementation bodies, and offering safer and more transparent border procedures. For AfCFTA, the strongest youth-related results are also likely to come from the practical implementation of support measures for Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME), digital inclusion, and skills, rather than from the Protocol language alone.

Proposed AfCFTA Theory of Change

The Theory of Change (ToC) begins with the Agreement’s Protocols and annexes, which set out the legal commitments of the seven dimensions. These legal commitments alone do not generate results. They need to be translated into practical instruments, mechanisms, and institutions that help State Parties, firms, and traders use the Agreement in practice.

These include the Guided Trade Initiative, the African Trade Observatory, the Non-Tariff Barriers Online Reporting Mechanism, the AfCFTA e-Tariff Book, the Implementation Review Mechanism, and the African Adjustment Fund. Together, they translate treaty provisions into practical tools for transparency, coordination and implementation.

If State Parties domesticate the Agreement and the mechanisms for coordination and implementation function effectively, this will lead to the following short-term outcomes: reduced barriers to trade, lower compliance costs, more predictable regulatory processes, an improved enabling digital trade environment, stronger business confidence, stronger engagement from women and youth and strengthened MSME inclusivity in trade.

Over the longer term, these improvements are expected to support higher intra-African trade and investment, deeper regional and continental value chains, increased alignment, stronger formalisation and greater innovation and technology diffusion.

At the impact level, these changes are expected to contribute to structural transformation, increased and better jobs, environmental sustainability, and economic resilience, ultimately contributing to inclusive and sustainable development for a more integrated, prosperous and peaceful Africa.

A visual representation of our theory of change is shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Reconstructed AfCFTA Theory of Change

Source: Authors

This results chain is not automatic. State Parties must remain politically committed and align national trade, investment, regulatory and industrial policies with AfCFTA objectives. They must domesticate the Agreement and its Protocols in a timely manner, establish the required institutions and focal points, and ensure that adequate technical, financial and administrative resources are available for implementation. Complementary investments in customs modernisation, transport and logistics, digital infrastructure, standards and productive capacity are also essential if firms and traders are to take advantage of the opportunities created by the Agreement. Just as importantly, the private sector must be sufficiently informed and prepared to respond, while dispute settlement, monitoring and implementation review mechanisms must function credibly enough to reinforce compliance and confidence.

These assumptions also point directly to the main risks. The AfCFTA’s results may be undermined by geopolitical and political economy disruptions, delayed or partial implementation across State Parties, limited awareness or readiness among firms to use AfCFTA preferences, and persistent weaknesses in transport, customs, regulatory and digital infrastructure. In other words, the gap between legal commitment and developmental impact is shaped not only by what the Agreement provides, but by the political, institutional and economic conditions under which it is implemented.

The ToC is a practical framework for understanding how the AfCFTA is expected to generate results, the conditions needed for those results to materialise, and the main constraints that may impede implementation. For policymakers, it provides a clear basis for monitoring the Agreement’s expected outcomes and impacts. It also makes clear that the Agreement’s transformative potential will depend not simply on what is written in its provisions, but on sustained political commitment, effective domestication, institutional capacity, complementary infrastructure, private-sector readiness, and credible monitoring and dispute-settlement systems. Without these conditions, the AfCFTA risks remaining an ambitious legal framework with only partial economic effects.

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On 20 January 2026, The Guardian reported excerpts from a leaked email written by Nick Checker, the newly appointed head of the US State Department’s Bureau of African Affairs. In it, he wrote that “Africa is a peripheral – rather than a core – theater for US interests”. This contrasts with the approach by China, which sees Africa as a core strategic partner.  

President Donald Trump’s second term has seen significant disruptions, and the drafting of policies and strategies has often been the opposite of those of his predecessors, Joe Biden and Barack Obama. Under the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), China is pursuing a less volatile approach. As China’s one-party state sticks to and refines its policies towards Africa, the democratic US is pursuing wildly oscillating policies depending on which party is elected.

In his second term of office, Trump has shut down the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), made moves to shut down the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC), left the future of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in doubt, and implemented visa restrictions to multiple African countries.

Under Xi’s rule, the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC) has continued its triennial meetings. The 2024 FOCAC summit, held in Beijing, unveiled the ten-partnership initiatives, aimed at advancing modernisation between China and Africa. China has been steadfast in its stance on Africa as a strategic partner. Xi became president in 2013, and the abolition of the two-term limit for the president in 2018 means that this approach is likely to continue.

The one-party state advantage

The developmental goals, investments, trade opportunities, and the quest for soft power that underlie China’s engagement with Africa are not short-term pursuits. They are sustained by consistent, long-term engagement rather than episodic, volatile initiatives.

China’s political structure is better equipped to operate on that timeline. Beijing is not subject to democratic electoral turnover and is therefore less prone to routinely reinventing its foreign policy priorities. China’s current political system allows it to easily align ministries, policy banks, and state-owned enterprises with its foreign policy objectives.

Even when Beijing recalibrates, the overarching direction remains broadly consistent: keep the engagement, expand the economic footprint, and consolidate influence. As a result of China’s consistency, it has remained Africa’s largest trading partner since 2009 and is now the continent’s largest bilateral lender. Beijing’s commitment to the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has led to construction contracts worth £46 billion in 2025.

China’s continuity is producing a cumulative effect. Chinese firms, including private ones, are playing important roles in China’s foreign engagement and are increasingly embedded in local African economies, strengthening ties. The triennial FOCAC summits, high-level visits, and the biennial China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo, together reinforce a sense of permanence. There is now a 36-year-long tradition of the Chinese foreign minister’s first overseas trip of the year being to Africa. African leaders may have mixed views about Chinese engagement, but there can be little doubt: China will still be there next year, and the year after that, for continued engagement.

The political fragility of the US

For decades, the United States has had significant engagements with Africa and remains a major partner on multiple fronts. Yet, despite US-Africa engagement dating back several years, it has been erratic in the last two decades. US investments in Africa soared from approximately £1.65bn in 2003 to £6.65bn in 2009, then declined in subsequent years. In 2022, US investments in Africa (£1.75bn) exceeded Chinese investment (£1.47bn) for the first time since 2012, and maintained its growing trajectory in 2023, with investments worth £4.25bn, before falling drastically to negative £1.58bn in 2024.

Current diplomatic relations between African countries and the US have become significantly strained. Trump’s visa ban, the shutdown of state agencies such as USAID, and the realignment of policies such as AGOA have disrupted economic ties. His boycott of the G20 summit hosted by South Africa in 2025 and his threats not to invite South Africa to the 2026 edition hosted by the US are emblematic of the volatile nature of US ties under the current administration.

Presidential transitions routinely reshape the framing of Africa in US strategy. During Obama’s administration, the US Strategy Towards Sub-Saharan Africa, released in 2012, highlighted four pillars of engagement: (1) Strengthen democratic institutions, (2) Spur economic growth, trade, and investment, (3) Advance peace and security, and (4) Promote opportunity and development.

Six years later, during Trump’s first term in office, the strategy encompassed three main agendas. The first was to advance US trade and commercial ties with African countries to the benefit of both the United States and Africa. Secondly, to counter the threat from Radical Islamic Terrorism and violent conflict, and finally, to ensure that US taxpayer dollars for aid are used efficiently and effectively.

In 2022, Biden’s government focused on the following objectives: (1) Foster openness and open societies, (2) Deliver democratic and security dividends, (3) Advance pandemic recovery and economic opportunity, (4) Support conservation, climate adaptation, and a just energy transition.

During his tenure, Obama visited seven African countries (Ghana, Egypt, Senegal, Ethiopia, South Africa, Kenya, and Tanzania) and held the first US-Africa Leaders Summit featuring over 50 African leaders. Trump never visited any African country, nor did he host the US-Africa Leaders Summit that Obama had initiated. Upon taking office, Biden hosted the second US-Africa Leaders Summit, featuring 49 African leaders, and visited 2 African countries (Angola and Cape Verde). In July 2025, Trump hosted a mini-summit at the White House, where he met African leaders from Gabon, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mauritania, and Senegal.

Engagement between the US and Africa has therefore been more volatile than China’s during Xi’s tenure. China has consistently prioritised its predictable summits with African leaders, high-level visits to the continent, and constantly stressed the need for partnership with Africa. Trump has yet to set foot on African soil, though Xi has done that multiple times.

The US democratic system is a source of legitimacy and accountability. But it comes with inherent uncertainties in foreign policy since elections reorder priorities. American voters are unlikely to consider presidential aspirants’ policies toward Africa when voting. Hence, the priority of US-Africa relations depends on the elected government’s political incentives. As a result, partisanship disrupts continuity and congressional dynamics, and polarisation can inject uncertainty into long-term commitments. US-Africa engagements have therefore been pendulous over the years, and in hedging against this volatility, African governments look to China as an important, less-volatile partner. The one-party state of China has leveraged its political system to pursue a less volatile engagement with Africa and, as a result, has chalked up continuously rising influence and a growing footprint on the African continent. On the other hand, the US’s democratic system makes its engagements with Africa more volatile, as policies and priorities change depending on who occupies the White House.

Photo credit: World Economic Forum used with permission CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

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The past decade has been punishing. In 2020, Africa collectively experienced its worst economic performance in 25 years. COVID-19 delivered a devastating shock, compounded by collapsing commodity prices and sharp capital outflows. As global risk aversion spiked, the US dollar surged, triggering classic emerging-market contagion. The “dollar smile” – Stephen Jen’s framework in which the dollar strengthens in times of global stress and exceptional US growth – tilted decisively against Africa, driving up debt-servicing costs dramatically. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine intensified the pressure. With some of Africa’s largest trading partners grappling with war, inflation, supply-chain disruption and interest-rate hikes, the continent imported not only food and fuel inflation but also the monetary tightening that followed. Capital once again fled to the safety of the dollar. 

Fiscal and balance-of-payments buffers—already thin—were exhausted. Countries such as Ghana, Zambia and Ethiopia spiralled into default. Coups, security concerns, and political drift further undermined confidence. As China tightened its lending, Europe wrestled with an energy crisis, and the US focused on taming inflation, many African countries found themselves with no option but to seek treatment at the International Monetary Fund’s (IMF) emergency ward. In short, policy space collapsed. Leaders had little choice but to swallow hard medicine and confront structural imbalances head-on. 

The turning of the tide

But at the onset of 2026, the mood is shifting. After almost a decade of inertia, stretching back to the Ebola crisis and the 2015 commodity crash, there are credible reasons for optimism. 

First, reform momentum has strengthened. Unlike many advanced economies, where political paralysis and policy timidity have widened credibility gaps, several Central banks and African governments have embarked on bold, often painful, structural reforms while maintaining political stability. South Africa has pushed ahead with fiscal, energy, and logistics overhauls, despite significant governance obstacles. A high point was the recent medium-term budget, which exceeded market expectations for deficit and debt consolidation. 

That this was achieved against severe growth and fiscal constraints and an unfavourable political climate highlights institutional discipline and reform credibility. Nigeria has also taken difficult but necessary steps towards economic orthodoxy after years of policy bungling under former president Muhammadu Buhari. Subsidy removal, exchange-rate liberalisation, monetary policy normalisation, and a statistical overhaul have re-anchored Nigeria’s macroeconomic fundamentals, minimised distortions, and added a measure of credibility and predictability. 

After being pushed to the brink of a fiscal cliff by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the Red Sea crisis, Egypt has moved to restore macroeconomic stability, attract investment, and secure IMF backing. Underscoring the significance of their reform trajectory, all three hegemons saw ratings upgrades in 2025. Importantly, these large economies act as regional anchors, and their reform trajectories lower risk premia, improve capital flows, and create positive spillovers across neighbouring markets. 

Second, the external environment is improving. The fading aura of US exceptionalism and a weaker dollar have offered welcome relief to emerging-market currencies. As the Federal Reserve moves towards an easing cycle, risk appetite is returning. For Africa, this matters enormously: cheaper global capital and a softer dollar typically translate into stronger balance sheets, more investor inflows and improved market access. 

This is evident by Eurobond dynamics. Côte d’Ivoire’s £1.3 billion bond, issued in March last year, was priced at 6.45 per cent, 15 basis points below a similar issuance in 2024. Angola’s second-ever Eurobond, a £1.3 billion dual tranche sold in October, was more than three times oversubscribed. Lower coupons, deeper order books and renewed investor appetite signalled a turning point not only for creditors but also for African sovereigns. External debt is becoming an increasingly viable tool for African sovereigns to refinance obligations, plug funding gaps and rebuild financial headroom. African currencies also saw robust performances against the dollar. After years on the back foot, the rand, kwacha, cedi and Congolese franc gained more than 13 per cent on the greenback. 

Third, funding conditions have become more benign, and options have been diversified. After years of anxiety over debt sustainability in major economies such as South Africa, Kenya and Egypt, markets are showing signs of reopening. Benin’s successful Eurobond issuance signalled a turning point, prompting other African sovereigns to test the waters. With debt priced at multi-year lows, five other national and supranational issuances were made. At the same time, bilateral and plurilateral firepower is expanding. Gulf states such as Qatar, Saudi Arabia and the UAE are deepening their engagement on the continent, bringing both capital and political heft. Qatar’s £9 billion investment agreement with Botswana was the standout deal of the year. 

Though yet to fully materialise, it could be the panacea for Gaborone, whose diamond dependence is pushing it towards a crisis. Europe has also opened its purse, pledging £11 billion to African renewable energy and infrastructure initiatives. African sovereigns are now enjoying greater funding optionality. This reduces dependence on markets and multilateral sources and affords a degree of bargaining power. It is also a spur for developmental spending, which has stagnated due to limited headroom. Financing options, combined with firmer commodity prices, should materially improve budget and current-account positions across multiple economies. 

Fourth, geopolitical factors have materially elevated Africa’s strategic value. As global powers adopt more explicit hedging strategies, Africa’s importance to global value chains and connectivity – maritime, land and digital – has become central to their ambitions. Further, the continent’s demographics, natural resources and geographic position make it simply too consequential to ignore. With close to 40 per cent of the world’s youth, Africa’s young population represents significant labour and consumer market potential against an ageing global population. And with 30 per cent of the world’s mineral reserves, Africa is crucial to global transitions in renewable energy, technology and defence. 

At the heart of strategy

It is unsurprising, therefore, that Africa remains at the heart of strategic frameworks among major players, including the US’s National Security Strategy, Europe’s Global Gateway Strategy, China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and Russia’s nominal Africa Corps strategy. The underlying message is clear: ignoring Africa is a strategic miscalculation with global ramifications, and disengagement risks ceding the initiative to competitors. These competitive forces dovetail neatly with Africa’s own agenda. If properly leveraged, they can strengthen bargaining power, fast-track industrialisation, and sustain growth momentum. 

There are already signs that Africa’s trajectory may continue throughout 2026. According to the IMF, the continent may expand by 4.4 per cent this year on the back of a commodity rally, a weaker dollar, reduced inflationary pressure and new investments. Should this be the case, it would be the first time in modern history that Africa outpaces Asia, which is poised to grow by 4.1 per cent. 

Nevertheless, some cautionary undercurrents may test the robustness of Africa’s upward trajectory. Insecurity, fragmentation, and political instability in West Africa threaten to undermine the progress made by countries such as Benin, Nigeria, and Côte d’Ivoire. Nigeria faces a dual threat of Islamist insurgency and banditry, which is causing upheaval in central and northern regions. Benin, recently known as a bastion of democracy and development, narrowly survived a coup attempt last December. Meanwhile, the stability of ECOWAS and WAEMU is being tested by secessionist movements in Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. 

In North and East Africa, geopolitical chess between Egypt and Ethiopia, played out in places like Eritrea, Somalia, and Sudan, threatens to open up new theatres of conflict. Meanwhile, two major southern African economies, South Africa and Zambia, face elections that may alter delicate political dynamics. Indeed, much of the momentum is heavily reliant on big men and their parties; nor is it yet to survive the crucible of repetitive political cycles. Consequently, efforts must be geared towards engendering cultural shifts, ringfencing governance with strong institutions, and expanding immunity to global risks. 

That said, the stars are aligning. Africa must convert the internal rebound and renewed global interest into tangible development gains. Luck may finally be moving in the right direction, but luck is not a strategy. The moment calls for deft policymaking, institutional strengthening and consistent implementation.  

The blog was originally published by Africa In Fact and republished with permission.

Photo credit: World Bank used with permission CC BY-NC-ND 4.0.

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Intra-African trade makes up around 15 per cent of the continent’s total trade. This is far below Europe (70 per cent) or Asia (nearly 60 per cent). To help fix this, the continent has developed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) to create a single market and boost trade between African countries. The AfCFTA aims to boost inter-African trade by 45 per cent, but its potential is throttled by non-tariff barriers.

The basic infrastructure required for continental trade remains fragmented. A truck transporting goods across West Africa can face up to 48 checkpoints and lose a week to paperwork. No shared digital systems exist for verifying identities, exchanging data, or making payments. This slows growth and keeps Africa dependent on distant trading partners. The answer lies in continent wide investment in Digital Public Infrastructure (DPI). These shared digital tools can provide the invisible rails that make trade and services flow easily, like in the case of the European Digital Infrastructure Consortium.

DPI builds foundational systems for digital identity, payments, and data exchange. These create the trusted connections that physical trade needs.

Three digital pillars for a connected continent

1. Foundational digital identity: Trust is the first casualty in a fragmented system. About half a billion Africans lack a verifiable digital identity, locking them out of formal services and cross-border economic activity. Projects like Ethiopia’s digital Fayda ID (ፋይዳ) initiative aim to enrol over 90 million by 2028. Enrolment in such projects is currently around 32 million. These are great initiatives, but the goal must be interoperability; an Ethiopian businessman’s digitally verified credentials should be recognised by a Kenyan bank or a Nigerian customs portal, enabling secure participation in the continental market.

2. Interoperable digital payments: Africa is a world leader in mobile money; however, cross-border payments remain a headache. Businesses deal with over 40 different currencies, relying on costly third-party conversions through the US dollar or Euro. Initiatives like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), launched under the AfCFTA, are crucial. Integrated into a broader DPI framework, such systems can allow a Ghanaian tech startup to invoice a customer in Rwanda and receive instant, low-cost payment in local currency, unleashing the potential of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises, which account for over 90 per cent of total business on the continent.

3. Secure data exchange: This pillar will enable different government and private sector systems to share information, with the user’s consent. For trade, it means a digital certificate of origin issued in Ethiopia can be instantly and reliably verified by customs officials in Mozambique or anywhere on the continent. For people, it could enable the portability of health records or professional credentials across borders. Successful national models, such as the X-Road system pioneered in Estonia, demonstrate how secure data exchange can slash bureaucracy.

The implementation challenges

The vision is clear, but the path is fraught with challenges that must be addressed from the outset. The idea sounds straightforward, but real hurdles stand in the way. Only 35-40 per cent of Africans regularly use the internet, and only 14-20 per cent have affordable internet access. Any digital system risks leaving most people behind. Leaders must pair infrastructure with affordable connectivity, digital literacy, and designs that reach everyone.

Effective DPI depends on institutional trust, not just the availability of technology. Governments will only replace manual procedures if they believe systems are secure, reliable, and well governed. Privacy laws, oversight, and inclusive planning are essential, and so lessons need to be learnt from past projects about how to avoid excluding vulnerable groups. Africa must also protect its independence. Foreign companies have built much of the continent’s digital backbone; Huawei alone accounts for around 70 per cent of Africa’s 4G network. Data breaches, such as reports that data from the African Union headquarters (built by China) was transferred to servers in Shanghai for years. Such incidents can erode confidence and hinder the interconnection of sensitive infrastructure, even when technology allows it. Open-source tools and shared standards help maintain control. Initiatives like the “50-in-5 campaign” show how countries can collaboratively build systems.

DPI only works if institutions trust it enough to replace manual processes. Without trust, digital systems exist on paper but borders still rely on stamps, physical checks, & discretionary approvals, so trade costs stay high.

What Africa must do next

The African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy (2020–2030) must serve as the central reference framework for all member states, regional blocs, national, and development partner digital initiatives. Its vision of a Digital Single Market by 2030, anchored in harmonised policies, interoperable digital infrastructure, and inclusive digital public goods, should guide every DPI investment across Africa. Accordingly, all DPI investments should comply with AU-endorsed standards for digital identity, payments, and data governance to ensure interoperability, avoid fragmentation, and accelerate continental integration.

Priority financing should be directed toward open-source, reusable digital public goods, such as the Modular Open-Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), a free, open-source platform that enables governments and organizations to create secure, scalable digital ID systems. Adopted by more than 25 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, including Ethiopia’s National ID, it receives support from development partners, including the World Bank’s group ID4D initiative and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change. MOSIP facilitates digital identity solutions, allowing countries to adopt shared systems rather than replicate isolated, proprietary solutions. The African Union should further demonstrate its leadership by accelerating the adoption of interoperable and binding continental frameworks for digital ID, data governance, and cross-border payments, thereby establishing a unified legal and institutional foundation for Africa’s digital integration.

DPI integration enhances intra-African trade by reducing inefficiencies and costs and improving cross-border transactions. Full implementation of the AfCFTA could significantly boost intra-African trade above current levels. Some estimates suggest that it could raise trade within the continent by 45 per cent compared to a no-agreement scenario, partly through digital harmonisation that reduces trade costs. It promotes trade by removing tariffs, simplifying customs procedures, reducing non-tariff barriers, and improving infrastructure, thereby creating Africa’s largest single market. DPI streamlines trade formalities, links digital markets with customs, and enables seamless payments, helping businesses and unbanked traders participate more effectively. Ultimately, this promotes a more integrated “One African Market.” This will create stronger trade within Africa, more resilient economies, and small businesses finally able to compete globally. The African Continental Free Trade Area can then realise its full potential. But to do so, now is the time to build digital bridges.

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On 20 January 2026 at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Canada’s Prime Minister Mark Carney bluntly stated that the global order was in “rupture”, not transition. He argued that the rules-based international order is no longer functioning as advertised. He warned, too, against the “performance of sovereignty while accepting subordination”, invoking Václav Havel’s shopkeeper who displays slogans to signal compliance rather than conviction, “living within a lie”.

This is an important diagnosis. And it matters that the leader of a G7 nation has come out and said it. But the process started much earlier. For many, the vital moment was not Carney’s speech, but the Executive Order signed on 20 January 2025 that froze US foreign assistance.

This is where the Davos diagnosis meets administrative reality. When Carney spoke of “rupture”, he is describing a shift in how the system is governed: away from predictable routines and towards discretionary switching, where access can be paused, repriced, or made conditional. Foreign assistance is one of the clearest places to see that shift. It is one of the everyday administrative instruments through which the post-1945 system has managed interdependence, influence, and compliance.

The 20 January 2025 freeze was widely reported as an “aid crisis”, but that language is too narrow because it misreads a governance shock as a sectoral story. The aid freeze was a bellwether. It was an early signal that a governing method long normalised at the periphery was being consolidated and made legible as a general rule, one exercised through the power to interrupt routine systems at will. Seen in that light, the freeze exposed the operating system beneath contemporary development: contracts, supply chains, staffing, reporting calendars, and compliance infrastructures coordinated through a limited number of metropoles. When the anchor, the external node coordinating that system, pauses, the system does not gradually adjust. It snaps.

The freeze exposed a structural feature of the post-1945 order that softer language obscures. Across much of sub-Saharan Africa, major sectors of service delivery have been synchronised to external decision centres rather than domestic policy cycles. This is not a story about insufficient “capacity”. It is a story about capacity being shaped to function inside donor circuits. When the circuits stop, the donor-built layers of delivery that have increasingly substituted for, or narrowed, domestic systems break.

The speed of the 2025 disruption is instructive. Payrolls froze. Commodity procurement halted. Clinics began rationing. This is the signature of a tightly coupled system: the very standardisation that made delivery auditable and legible also makes withdrawal coordinated and simultaneous. What looked like managerial efficiency becomes, under shock, systemic fragility.

Ghana illustrates both the possibilities and the limits of response. The government moved to uncap the National Health Insurance Levy and increased the National Health Insurance Scheme funding to £675 million, a 66 per cent jump from the previous year, while working to offset the abrupt withdrawal of £58 million in USAID health support.

This was a serious attempt to mobilise dormant fiscal instruments when external pipelines stalled. Yet it also revealed the structure of the problem: even where domestic revenue can be raised, a single budget cycle cannot recreate the parallel architecture of supply chains, programme contracts, and data systems that external financing had underwritten over two decades.

Malawi‘s situation is starker, shaped by narrower fiscal space. The government allocated £9 million to the Ministry of Health and announced plans to recruit 6,000 health workers onto the government payroll to mitigate PEPFAR-related cuts. Again, this is meaningful crisis management. But facilities still operate under strain, prevention services are curtailed, and technical capacity thins as donor-funded clerks disappear. The architecture cannot be rebuilt overnight.

From freeze to doctrine

By November 2025, the US National Security Strategy codified the governing logic behind the freeze: interdependence would be treated as leverage, not assumed continuity.

The NSS portrays the post-Cold War settlement as a strategic error and criticises previous administrations for having “lashed American policy to a network of international institutions.” It describes the US economy as a source of “leverage over countries that want access to our markets.” On Africa, it calls for a transition “from a foreign aid paradigm to an investment and growth paradigm.” What the freeze enacted, the NSS narrated as doctrine, even as many actors continued to behave as if continuity would hold.

That a Davos speech was still needed to “name” the shift reveals how deeply the performance of continuity had insulated even attentive observers from what was already on the public record. Seen in that light, the consequences are clear. Once leverage is normalised, the remaining issue is distribution: who absorbs the shocks when continuity is suspended, and who is newly surprised to find themselves exposed.

For many in the West, what is newly unsettling is not that leverage exists, but that the US is now exercising it more openly over its own partners, turning what once felt like a stable bargain into a relationship that can be suspended, repriced, and renegotiated. The post-1945 settlement relied on a shared expectation that whatever coercion or hypocrisy existed at the edges, the centre would keep providing predictability for its allies. Carney’s candour at Davos punctures that comfort.

He did not merely lament decline; he named the useful fiction that held the centre together: predictable rules, reliable alliances, and durable institutions, including NATO, the WTO, and the Bretton Woods institutions, treated as stabilisers rather than bargaining chips. What is changing now is the direction of exposure. The logic being felt inward is conditional access: cooperation, market entry, and institutional routines treated as levers that can be paused, conditioned, or repriced to enforce compliance, whether through trade terms, financing conditions, or alliance expectations.

For African states and the Global South in general, by contrast, the grammar of leverage is not novel. Structural adjustment conditionalities, tied aid, and performance regimes have long made upward accountability to external funders more structurally salient than downward accountability to citizens. What changes now is not the existence of leverage but its explicitness.

That contrast sharpens the real issue. In a leverage-governed world, sovereignty is not a slogan. It is the ability to keep routine governance running when the anchor pauses. The answer is not autarky. A world of fortresses would indeed be poorer and more fragile. The point is that resilience cannot mean absorbing shocks within externally anchored systems. It means building the domestic capacity to weather those pauses: fiscal space first, then administrative depth, then productive capacity, and ultimately regional bargaining power.

What the freeze clarified is that subordination does not require formal conquest. It arrives through permissions in an operating system: who gets paid, what gets procured, which routines continue, and which can be suspended overnight. The Global South has long managed that reality. Many in the West are only now confronting it first-hand.

Photo credit: Bank of England used with permission CC BY-ND 2.0

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The clash between US and Chinese tech giants is shaping the digital landscape in Africa. On the one hand, Chinese companies like Huawei, Alibaba, and ByteDance have made substantial investments in African startups and digital ecosystems. They provide infrastructure, funding, technology expertise, and platforms that help local entrepreneurs develop digital businesses. On the other hand, companies like Google, Meta, and Nvidia are also placing big bets on products and services that will consolidate their market hold on the continent.

The rivalry between US and Chinese tech firms brings significant social and economic opportunities. But African markets are framed as strategic terrain, not rights-bearing societies. Nation-states lack collective bargaining power, and development narratives are used to justify exceptions to rights and low-cost labour norms. All of which means the rights of Africans could be collateral damage in geopolitical competition.

Market dominance strategies

The African tech market presents a unique scenario. Global tech titans are competing with weak and emerging local platforms for the attention of a young and digitally savvy population.

By providing interconnected services that work seamlessly together, big tech companies create digital dependencies that are difficult for local competitors to disrupt. Companies looking to establish themselves in new markets can therefore lock in customers for the long haul.

For example, Google dominates the digital advertising and search markets in African countries. This is not surprising as most users access internet services through their phones that run on versions of the Android operating system developed by Google. Android holds 83 per cent market share of mobile phones in Africa. These users are then funnelled into other Google products with which their phone is designed to operate seamlessly. This includes internet browsers, the data from which is used by Google to sell targeted ads to the user. This can generate huge profits, large amounts of power, but also increases the sense of competition between the companies as a zero-sum game.

The consequences of competition

We are increasingly seeing the consequences of this competition as the drive for market dominance overshadows duties of care to users and employers. Meta (which operates Facebook) has faced significant legal scrutiny for its algorithmic practices. In Kenya and South Africa, the platform’s content recommendation algorithms have been shown to amplify existing social biases, creating digital environments that can exacerbate social tensions and reinforce harmful stereotypes. In Ethiopia, the platform has been accused of contributing to inter-ethnic violence.

The mental health crisis among content moderators and AI model labellers represents one of the most shocking dimensions of the technology industry’s exploitation. In East African countries, content moderators hired by the local company called Sama to train Facebook algorithms reported severe psychological trauma from continually reviewing violent and graphic content, terrorist propaganda, and other extremely disturbing visual material. These workers are essentially human shields protecting users around the world from traumatic online content, but they receive minimal psychological support and are paid extremely low wages. These workers are essential to maintaining the technological infrastructure of global tech platforms and generate billions of dollars in revenue, yet they remain largely invisible, underpaid and undervalued.

The situation with cobalt mining in the Democratic Republic of Congo is perhaps the most egregious example of technology supply chain exploitation. The country produces more than 60 per cent of cobalt in the world. Major tech companies from Apple to Tesla have been implicated in supply chains involving child labour and unsafe working conditions. Children as young as six have been observed working in cobalt mines, extracting minerals that are essential for lithium-ion batteries used in smartphones, electric vehicles, and other high-tech products. In 2019, 14 families sued the largest US tech companies and two mining companies after their children died or were injured in an underground tunnel collapse. They claim that the companies had “specific knowledge” of forced or compulsory child labour in the informal or artisanal mining that fuels their operations. The case was dismissed by a US court in 2024.

The absence of effective regulatory frameworks in many African countries allows these practices to continue relatively unchecked. Without collective regulation, regional negotiations, and explicit requirements for respecting human rights from the outset, Africa is a data mine, a testing ground for weak standards, and a market to be captured rather than a digital co-producer. If current trends persist, Africa will be locked into a subordinate position where its data is systematically extracted to fuel a global technological explosion but never leveraged locally. Foreign platforms will continue to dictate the rules, and governments will only react.

Strategic shift

There is a regulatory momentum in Africa to tackle the risks of unchecked technological concentration. The continent wants to shift from the position of a passive recipient of technology and innovation to an active digital governance actor. In fact, it is increasingly attracting the attention of large platforms and digital companies due to its young population, growing markets, and untapped digital potential. This translates into massive investments. Private capital in Africa will be the most attractive of any emerging market within five years.

In a world where data is the “new oil”, African economies must stop exporting crude data and importing refined intelligence. Data and knowledge extraction without local capitalisation locks nations into subordination. Global platforms must undergo mandatory human rights impact assessments that are made public and independently reviewed. Binding commitments on labour and privacy are essential prerequisites for operation. Sovereignty should not be traded for connectivity.

African countries must transition from simple data protection to strategic technology governance and invest in public digital infrastructure. Access to African demographics and resources is a privilege, not a right. Therefore, platforms should legally become data fiduciaries with a duty of care. Tech companies that source minerals or outsource services from Africa should be subject to mandatory human rights and environmental due diligence and held accountable for damages related to their operations and value chains. Competition policy should explicitly integrate ethical considerations.

Africa should work towards a unified and robust digital market. It must develop rigorous frameworks covering data, competition, labour and tax. Harmonised standards will limit regulatory shopping by multinationals and strengthen collective bargaining power. Regional bodies should support joint investigations, coordinated law enforcement efforts, and the cross-border sharing of technical capabilities to address the complex practices of big tech.

By enabling strategies that internalise the negative externalities, investigate market practices, and protect human rights, African countries will foster local innovation and create equitable technological development. If they don’t, the continent will leave itself at the mercy of Big Tech companies, who have already shown the harm their business practices can reap.

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