I Have Believed in COMESA from the Beginning

There are things you believe in before you have the language to explain why. COMESA is one of those things for me.

I was introduced to what was then the Preferential Trade Area — the PTA — as a child. Not in a classroom. Not through a textbook. Erastus Mwencha, my father's closest confidant, joined PTA when I was 4 years old. As a result, I interacted with the men and women who sat at the highest tables of this institution, who carried in their eyes a vision of what Africa could become if she chose to trade with herself, trust herself, and build together. I did not fully understand the economics then. But I understood the conviction. And conviction, when it is genuine, has a way of staying with you.

Decades later, as COMESA gathers under the theme Enhancing COMESA's Strategic Positioning and Resilience in the Evolving Global Order, I find myself reflecting not only on how far this institution has come — but on what its journey reveals about what Africa is becoming.

From PTA to Powerhouse

The Preferential Trade Area became COMESA in December 1994. Today, it is a 21-member regional economic community spanning from Tunisia to Eswatini — covering 12 million square kilometres and a population of over 583 million people. It is the largest regional economic organisation on the continent by membership.

Those numbers matter. But they are not what moves me. What moves me is the trajectory — the stubborn insistence on integration through four decades of turbulence, political change, and a global order that has not always been kind to African ambitions.

Intra-COMESA trade has grown from $1.5 billion when the Free Trade Area launched in 2000 to $14 billion in 2024. That is a nine-fold increase — built on deliberate policy, regional solidarity, and an unwillingness to accept the status quo.

Yes, intra-COMESA trade still represents only about 6% of the region's total trade — a figure that stands in stark contrast to Europe's 67% or Asia's 61%. There is honest work ahead. But the direction of travel is right. And the tools being built are beginning to match the ambition.

When Women Trade, Households Prosper

Of all COMESA's recent innovations, the 50 Million African Women Speak platform — 50MAWS — holds a particular place in my heart. Not because it is a digital tool. But because of what it is built on: the truth that African women have always been this continent's most resilient economic actors. We have simply never been given infrastructure to match our ambition.

50MAWS changes that. Implemented jointly by COMESA, the East African Community, and ECOWAS — with funding from the African Development Bank — it is accessible across 38 African countries. It provides women entrepreneurs with a one-stop digital gateway: access to financial services, market connections, business training, and a network of women across borders who are building, not waiting.

Women make up the majority of informal cross-border traders in the COMESA region. They move goods across borders in ways that rarely appear in trade statistics, carrying enormous economic weight with minimal institutional support. 50MAWS begins to formalise that energy — giving it visibility, connectivity, and the dignity of being seen as the engine it has always been.

38 countries. One platform. Millions of women entrepreneurs finding each other.

In 2024, partners launched a second phase of the platform, with new features validated at a joint planning workshop in Abidjan. The platform is also now converging with AfCFTA digital marketplace frameworks — meaning the infrastructure being built today is not siloed, but continental in its ambition.

When women trade, households prosper. When women connect across borders, economies transform. This is not sentiment. It is data, lived experience, and stubborn continental truth.

When Systems Digitize, Economies Grow

The Electronic Certificate of Origin may not sound like the most exciting story from a regional summit. But I want to make the case for why it is one of the most important things happening in African trade right now.

Since the COMESA Free Trade Area launched in 2000, certificates of origin have been the passport through which goods claim preferential treatment across borders. For over two decades, that process was entirely manual — paper-based, slow, vulnerable to fraud, and layered in administrative burden that disproportionately hurt small traders.

COMESA's Council of Ministers called for a digital solution as far back as 2014. The eCO system was formally launched in November 2024. Since then, the rollout has been swift. Eswatini was the first to go live, followed by Malawi and Zambia in December 2024, Zimbabwe, and Kenya in 2025. In the months since the regional rollout, more than 5,400 electronic certificates have already been issued across participating states.

5,400+ eCOs issued. Manual bottlenecks replaced. Real-time verification. Zero paper.

What does this mean in practice? Exporters register online. Certificates are digitally signed and instantly verifiable by customs authorities across the region. Forgery — which has been a persistent drain on both government revenue and trader confidence — becomes structurally harder. Clearance times shrink. Trust in the system grows.

But here is the signal I find most compelling: in June 2025, the AfCFTA Secretariat sent a delegation to COMESA headquarters in Lusaka specifically to benchmark off the eCO system. The continental free trade architecture is learning from what COMESA built. That is not a footnote. That is leadership.

COMESA is not merely adapting to the evolving global order. On trade digitization, it is setting the standard for the continent.

Closing Reflection

I began this reflection with a childhood memory — the vision I witnessed carried by COMESA's early architects. I end it with something more personal.

Faith, for me, is not passive. It is the kind of believing that calls you to act, to build, to show up — even when the evidence is still catching up to the conviction. I believed in COMESA before I could articulate the economics. Now the economics are articulating themselves.

$14 billion in intra-regional trade. Thirty-eight countries connected for women entrepreneurs. Five thousand certificates processed digitally in months. An AfCFTA delegation benchmarking off the region's innovation. These are not small things. These are the early chapters of a very large story.

The theme of this summit — resilience and strategic positioning in an evolving global order — is exactly right for the moment. The world is shifting. Supply chains are being re-evaluated. The era of Africa as a passive recipient of the global order's decisions is ending. COMESA's job, and our job as Africans who believe in this integration project, is to make sure that when the world re-orders, Africa has already built the infrastructure to trade on its own terms.

I believed in COMESA from its PTA beginnings. I believe in it more today. Not blindly — but with eyes wide open to the work still ahead, and with gratitude for the work already done.