Africa to Africa Is Not Enough

There is a question we have learned to ask about African trade. Is it growing, or is it shrinking? It is the wrong question. Or, more honestly, it is only half of one. Because trade can grow and still leave us poorer. The figure that should keep us awake at night is not how much we trade. It is how much of the value stays.

Volume Was Never the Promise

The numbers are real, and they are improving. Afreximbank's latest outlook puts total African trade at roughly US$1.4 trillion in 2025, with intra-African trade now accounting for about 18 percent of that — close to a quarter of a trillion dollars moving between Africans, rather than out of Africa. The year before, intra-African trade grew by more than 12 percent. The direction of travel is, for once, encouraging.

And yet the continent still supplies only 3.3 percent of the world's exports. We remain, in too many corridors, a place that sells the world its raw material and buys back the finished version of its own resources. A continent can ship more and grow weaker. Volume up, value out. The headline rises while the substance drains.

Volume up, value out. The headline rises while the substance drains.

So the encouraging signal beneath the figures is not that we are trading more. It is that we are slowly learning to be each other's customers. We are turning inward. But turning inward is only the first half of the discipline.

The Leak We Do Not Put on the Balance Sheet

Here is where I want to push the conversation one step further than it usually goes. It is not enough to trade Africa to Africa. We have to settle Africa to Africa too — and that is a different problem entirely.

Consider the plumbing. A payment from a business in Lagos to a supplier in Nairobi still, far too often, travels to London or New York, converts into dollars, and comes home. Sub-Saharan Africa remains the most expensive region on earth to move money: the average cost of a cross-border transfer sits above 8 percent, bank-led transfers can approach 15, and in thin corridors such as Tanzania to Rwanda the figure climbs higher still. The dollar detour alone adds two to five percent to nearly every intra-African transaction.

And the structure is getting worse, not better. Global banks have spent the past few years walking away from African correspondent relationships — a quiet retreat the industry politely calls de-risking. More than a hundred African institutions lost those relationships across 2024 and 2025. Fewer correspondents means less competition, which means a higher price for what remains. The African Development Bank estimates that poor connectivity, financial included, adds 30 to 40 percent to the cost of trading within our own borders.

Now picture it plainly. Two African businesses, both on the continent, trading with each other — and a slice of the value still leaves, every single time, as a fee paid to settle in a currency that is not ours. That is the leak. We do not measure it. It never appears as a loss on anyone's books. But it is value created here and captured elsewhere, transaction after transaction, year after year.

The Rail Is the Sovereignty

This is why I keep returning to PAPSS — the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System. Most coverage frames it as a convenience: faster payments, lower fees. That undersells what it is.

A settlement rail is a sovereign asset. Whoever owns it keeps the float, the spread, the data, the fee.

For a generation, that owner has been somewhere else. PAPSS is the first serious attempt to bring the settlement layer home — to let an African transaction clear in African currencies, between African banks, without the offshore detour that has quietly taxed us for decades.

The scale is beginning to move. Launched in 2022, the network by early 2026 connects more than 160 participating banks across roughly nineteen countries and four regions, with the central banks and national switches standing behind them. It now runs three products — an instant payment system, an African currency marketplace, and a card. Afreximbank projects that, at scale, the system could save the continent more than US$5 billion a year in transaction costs, cutting payment costs by up to half.

Five billion dollars is not a rounding error. It is value that, for the first time, has a structural chance of staying.

Kenya Has a Quiet Advantage

In February 2026, Pesalink — the rail that already moves money between Kenyan banks, SACCOs, fintechs and telcos — connected directly into PAPSS. With that single link, more than eighty Kenyan participants now sit one hop away from over 160 banks across the continent, settling in local currency, around the clock.

That is the architecture of value-capture made concrete. A trader in Nairobi paying a supplier in Accra no longer has to route her money through a third continent to do it. The road home got shorter, and cheaper, almost overnight.

The Route That Matters Is Invisible

So let me offer a different answer to the question we began with. The most important trade route of the coming decade is not a shipping lane. It is not even, on its own, Africa to Africa. It is the settlement rail running underneath the trade — the invisible road the money travels home on.

There is an old wisdom about stewardship: that we are measured not by how much passes through our hands, but by how much we are trusted to keep and to grow. A continent is no different. We have spent a generation proving we can produce. The work now is to prove we can keep.

Somewhere this morning, a woman in Nairobi is invoicing a buyer in Lagos. The goods are African. The buyer is African. The only question left is whether the value, too, gets to stay African.

For the first time in a long time, the answer is starting to be yes.