Africa’s ambition to build a more integrated and resilient economy will depend on how effectively countries implement new continental rules governing digital trade, investment and intellectual property, according to Gilberto Antonio, Chief Technical Advisor at the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat.
Mr. Antonio, who heads the Secretariat’s work on digital trade, investment and intellectual property rights, said the three areas are interconnected and are intended to remove some of the barriers that African businesses face when trading, investing and scaling innovations across borders.
Speaking on the AfCFTA podcast, he said the continent had made significant progress in establishing the legal framework needed to support a single African market, but implementation remained critical to turning those provisions into practical benefits for businesses.
“Digital trade go beyond e-commerce,” Mr. Antonio said, explaining that while e-commerce provides platforms for customers and small and medium-sized enterprises to buy and sell, digital trade encompasses a much wider range of commercially enabled activities.
These include digital payments, cross-border data flows and digital identity, he said.
Cross-border payments remain a challenge
Mr. Antonio said Africa had demonstrated considerable innovation in digital payments, particularly through mobile money, pointing to the experience of countries such as Kenya and Ghana. “However, there is still a challenge in terms of cross-border digital payment,” he said.
The difficulty, according to him, is ensuring that a small business in one African country can make payments easily to a business in another.
He explained that although domestic digital payments can be almost instantaneous, cross-border transactions can still involve high fees and delays when traditional banking systems are used. “If you do through the traditional tools like a bank, it can take more than one, three days,” he said, adding that in some cases money may have to leave Africa through a correspondent bank before returning to the continent to reach the intended recipient.
The AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade is intended to address some of these challenges through principles and binding provisions, including provisions related to interoperability.
Mr. Antonio said the prospects for digital trade across Africa were “really, really positive,” but stressed that the continent must establish an enabling ecosystem and appropriate legal and regulatory frameworks to allow digital commerce to take place more easily and quickly.
Connecting digital trade, investment and intellectual property
For Mr. Antonio, the three protocols under his portfolio are not isolated instruments but parts of a broader framework designed to support African businesses.
He illustrated this with the example of an entrepreneur in Ghana who develops an innovative digital payment platform and wants to deploy it across Africa.
Such an entrepreneur would first require a legal framework that enables the platform to operate across borders and protects the underlying innovation. This is where intellectual property protection becomes important.
Once the business begins expanding, the entrepreneur may require capital to grow. That is where the investment framework comes into play. “All these protocols that are part of the AfCFTA agreement are connected and is really intended to boost inter-African trade,” he said.
The Protocol on Investment, he explained, is intended to facilitate intra-African investment and attract investment capable of supporting the continent’s development.
He also emphasised the importance of creating a predictable investment regime capable of giving investors greater confidence.
“If you want to increase the size of your company, if you want to increase the volume of products that either you are selling or you are manufacturing, you need investment, you need capital,” he said.
Protecting Africa’s innovations
Intellectual property protection, meanwhile, is becoming increasingly important as African businesses and innovators seek to expand beyond their domestic markets. Mr. Antonio said intellectual property enables innovators to protect their ideas, brands, products and innovations.
For African businesses, Mr. Antonio said, stronger intellectual property protection can make it possible to build and expand brands across the continent while reducing the risk of unauthorized replication.
“It allows you to scale and to be known across the continent with the protections that no one will replicate without your authorization,” he said.
SMEs and young innovators at the centre
Mr. Antonio said small and medium-sized enterprises would be an important focus of the digital trade agenda. Young innovators are also being targeted through initiatives such as the AfCFTA Digital Innovators Challenge, which was launched the previous year and is expected to continue annually.
The initiative is intended to identify promising innovations and provide support to innovators beyond simply developing an idea or creating a platform.
According to Mr. Antonio, successful innovation requires more than the idea itself. “You have to make it known to the continent,” he asserted. Innovators also need institutional support and must make their ideas “bankable” if they are to move from concept to implementation.
The first edition produced what Mr. Antonio described as encouraging results. He expressed the expectation that participation would increase in the second edition, alongside efforts to bring more institutions on board to support the initiative.