Does Africa really produce what it doesn’t need, or rather, what it can?

An article recently published on Joy News in Ghana highlights an undeniable truth: Africa’s overreliance on raw-material exports limits the transformative potential of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The article argues that without value addition, intra-African trade will remain shallow, and that competition (especially from China) undermines Africa’s industrial growth because African producers struggle to match the low prices, large-scale production, and efficiency of Chinese firms, leaving local industries unable to compete both regionally and globally. These points are valid and align with long-standing critiques of Africa’s commodity-dependent trade structure (the so-called “commodity trap”) and the urgent need for industrial diversification. However, the analysis in the article also presents several conceptual weaknesses that make its overall diagnosis too narrow and somewhat misleading.

Saying that “Africa produces what it doesn’t need” oversimplifies the problem. A more accurate statement is that Africa produces “what it can”, given its structural constraints: limited industrial capacity, infrastructure gaps, and fragmented markets. The AfCFTA was precisely designed to change this scenario by creating scale, encouraging the blooming of regional value chains, and attracting investment into manufacturing and services.

The AfCFTA is not “struggling” because Africa produces what it doesn’t need. It is struggling because production, industrialization, and markets remain fragmented. Africa does not lack demand; it lacks value chains capable of transforming its vast natural and agricultural resources into competitive regional products, as we argue in this paper.

Moreover, the analysis confuses trade outcomes with production causes. African countries trade little among themselves not simply because they lack the products that other African nations need, but because tariff and non-tariff barriers, poor transport connectivity, cumbersome border procedures, and weak institutions make intra-continental trade costly and inefficient. Even when Africa produces value-added goods (such as pharmaceuticals or processed rubber) these are often held back by fragmented regulatory systems and poor infrastructure, not by a lack of demand. Evidence shows that intra-African trade is disproportionately focused on manufactured goods. According to UNECA, when African countries trade among themselves they exchange more manufactured and processed goods, transfer more knowledge, and generate more value, compared with their trade with extracontinental partners. UNECA reports that already more than 10 years ago, in 2014, manufactured goods accounted for 41.9 % of intra-regional exports compared to only 14.8 % of exports leaving the continent.

By focusing too narrowly on China’s competitiveness, the article also risks externalizing responsibility. Africa’s economic challenges are not just the result of pressure from China or other global players. They also reflect domestic policy choices. Many governments in Africa have failed to leverage trade agreements to foster industrial growth, instead focusing on short-term measures to ease import shortages or lower consumer prices. For example, rather than investing in local manufacturing to produce essential goods like fertilizers or textiles, some countries still rely on temporary subsidies or tax exemptions (e.g. on fuel), to make imported products cheaper. While these policies provide short-term relief for local consumers, they do little to strengthen domestic production over the long term, as highlighted by the World Bank in a recent publication on the use of fuel subsidies by African nations.

The article rightly identifies Africa’s deficit in value addition. However, it is misleading to claim that the AfCFTA is “struggling” simply because Africa produces what it doesn’t consume—a phrase coined by Tanzanian-Kenyan scholar Ali Mazrui in 1974 in his book "Africa, the next 30 years". Now, not 30, but after more than 50 years from that publication, the situation is fundamentally different and Africa's economic reality has evolved. The success of the AfCFTA depends not just on altering Africa’s production patterns, but on fostering added-value transformation through coordinated industrial and trade policies that build regional value chains and achieve economies of scale. This objective, however, cannot be achieved without an holistic approach that addresses infrastructure deficits, limited industrial capacity, informality, and skills gaps, as we described here.