Afreximbank published a new research note on June 16. Volume 10, Issue 1 of the bank’s Trade and Development Finance Brief, titled “Africa’s Trade and Investment Landscape,” examines the structural challenges shaping Africa’s trade performance and investment outlook in an increasingly uncertain global environment. The timing gives it a specific function. Three months after the bank’s annual outlook framed Africa as a supply chain pivot in a fragmenting world, this brief arrives with a colder read of the same situation. The two documents don’t contradict each other. But read together, they define the actual problem more precisely.
The March report argued that global supply chain reconfiguration was opening a structural window for Africa. The June brief maps why that window is harder to climb through than the framing suggested. Africa’s trade landscape remains heavily dominated by export of raw materials, while imports continue to be heavily skewed towards manufactured goods and machinery. The existing export-import configuration leaves many African economies overly exposed to unfavourable terms-of-trade shocks on account of external headwinds, including commodity price volatility, geopolitical tensions and associated global supply chain disruptions. The brief is describing not just a vulnerability, but a structural lock-in. The continent that geopolitics is supposedly repositioning as a production hub still exports raw inputs and imports the industrial goods those inputs were meant to generate.
The investment data sharpens this. African FDI inflows surged to a record $96 billion in 2024, then fell sharply to $59 billion in 2025. North Africa alone accounted for 52 percent of total African FDI inflows in 2024, with Egypt driving the majority of it. The headline number obscures the geography. The 2024 record was not a continental boom. It was one mega-deal in Egypt. Strip it out and the underlying picture is modest, concentrated, and volatile. The direction of investment flows remains uneven across sub-regions, with Eastern and Southern Africa receiving a larger share of foreign direct investment compared to Western and Central Africa. West Africa, which holds a substantial share of the continent’s mining and energy assets, is not capturing a proportionate share of the industrial investment that would allow those assets to generate more than commodity export revenue.
Morocco, South Africa and Egypt remain Africa’s leading industrial economies. The countries absorbing the supply chain diversification thesis in practice are North African, with geographic proximity to Europe, pre-existing manufacturing infrastructure, and trade agreements that provide preferential access to large consumer markets. Morocco and Egypt have attracted FDI into automobile and aeronautics production; Ethiopia and Kenya are seeing investments in textiles and apparel. The logic is clear: industrial relocation goes where conditions already exist to absorb it, not where the resource base is largest.
This is the gap the June brief is actually measuring. Afreximbank identified regulatory reforms, stronger institutions, economic diversification, improved access to finance for SMEs and greater adoption of digital financial technologies as essential components of a more resilient trade ecosystem. These are structural prerequisites, not near-term adjustments. They describe what needs to exist before industrial capital moves, not what triggers it to move.
The question this raises for West African resource economies is specific. The supply chain reconfiguration underway globally is real. The demand for African minerals, energy inputs and agricultural commodities is not in question. What is in question is whether the value capture from those flows happens on the continent, or whether the region continues to supply the raw material for industrial transformation occurring elsewhere. The AfCFTA, alongside the African Union’s Agenda 2063, provides a framework for integrating fragmented markets and strengthening regional value chains, with intra-African exports potentially increasing by more than 20 percent within the next decade as implementation advances. That is a ten-year projection. The industrial allocation decisions being made today by companies diversifying out of Asia will not wait ten years.
The Afreximbank brief does not say this directly. But the data it assembles points to a narrow and closing window between the framing of opportunity and the structural conditions required to capture it.
Sources: Afreximbank, Trade and Development Finance Brief Vol. 10, Issue 1, June 16, 2026; African Trade and Economic Outlook 2026, March 30, 2026; UNCTAD FDI data via Andaman Partners, April 2026.