The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is one of the most ambitious economic projects in the world. The challenge now is delivery: building the systems that allow businesses to trade across African borders with greater speed, trust and confidence.
The AfCFTA has the potential to reshape Africa’s economic future. Fully implemented, it could double intra-African trade by 2035 – an extra $70 billion a year – creating up to 30 million jobs across an African market of more than 1.3 billion people.
Yet for many businesses – especially smaller firms and cross-border traders – the everyday experience of trade remains slow, fragmented and costly. Moving goods across borders often means navigating disconnected systems for documentation, identity verification, payments and data exchange. For governments, the challenge is not only to simplify rules, but also to build the digital infrastructure that allows those rules to work in practice.
That is where ADAPT comes in.
What is ADAPT?
ADAPT is an African-led digital-transformation initiative of the AfCFTA Secretariat, developed in collaboration with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, IOTA Foundation and the World Economic Forum.
At its simplest, ADAPT is about building the digital foundations that make cross-border trade easier.
The AfCFTA reflects the ambition of a more integrated African market across 55 countries. ADAPT focuses on one of the practical questions that follows: what infrastructure do governments and businesses need to enable cross-border trade to work more efficiently?
That means helping different systems communicate with one another, enabling secure digital identity, supporting faster and more reliable payments, and making it easier to exchange trusted trade information. These may sound like technical issues, but they are central to whether businesses can trade with confidence beyond their own borders.
A trade agreement can reduce barriers on paper, but digital public infrastructure helps determine whether those reforms are felt in practice by millions.
Why does Africa need this kind of digital trade infrastructure?
For many businesses, intra-African trade remains harder than it should be.
A company trying to sell goods or services into another African market must prove who it is, submit manual documentation, move money, verify goods and comply with different national requirements. Too often, these steps sit within separate systems that do not easily connect, raising costs of trade and finance.
The result is often friction: delays, duplicated paperwork, higher costs and greater uncertainty. In many cases, trading within Africa is harder and more complex than exporting to developed international markets.
Large companies can often absorb or work around that complexity. Smaller firms usually cannot. For micro, small and medium-sized enterprises, as well as many women and young entrepreneurs, the cost of navigating fragmented systems can be the difference between reaching a new market and remaining local.
This is why digital trade infrastructure matters. It is not technology for its own sake; it is a means to an end. It is about reducing the practical barriers that prevent more African businesses from trading with each other and participating in regional and global value chains.
What will happen during the pilot phase?
Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria have been selected as the first countries to implement ADAPT due to their political commitment, institutional readiness and practical capacity to deliver the initiative. Together, they will serve as early pioneers in digital trade transformation.
The pilot phase will focus on a central question: what does it take to make digital trade easier across borders?
This means looking at how countries can connect key systems – such as digital identity, payments and trade documentation – so that businesses can exchange information, verify transactions and move goods more efficiently.
This is not yet a full continental rollout. It is the first stage of implementation. The aim is to learn from Kenya, Morocco and Nigeria, understand what works in practice, and use those lessons to shape ADAPT’s expansion into more countries over time.
What could this mean for businesses and entrepreneurs?
For businesses, it means fewer barriers between an opportunity and a sale, lower costs and simpler trade regulations.
A food producer in Kenya, a digital-service provider in Nigeria or a manufacturer in Morocco should not need to navigate a maze of disconnected systems to reach customers in another African market. If ADAPT succeeds, the long-term outcome could be a trading environment where businesses can verify, pay for, document and move goods with greater confidence, while reducing the cost of finance.
The AfCFTA Secretariat has described digital public infrastructure across identity, payments and data systems as the engine that can lower trade costs, expand market access, and enable a more competitive, inclusive and resilient African single market.
This is where the human impact becomes clear. More efficient systems do not just benefit governments or large exporters. They can help more entrepreneurs test demand in new markets, help firms receive payments more securely, and help smaller businesses participate in regional trade that may previously have felt out of reach.
The impact will depend on implementation. But the opportunity is significant: making cross-border trade feel less like a privilege for the largest companies and more like a practical option for businesses of all sizes.
What makes ADAPT different from previous digital trade efforts?
The significance of ADAPT lies in its ambition to connect systems, not simply digitise paperwork.
Many governments have made progress in building digital services. The harder challenge is interoperability – ensuring that different systems built in different countries can recognise each other, exchange information securely and support cross-border trust.
ADAPT brings together several foundations of digital trade including identity, payments and data exchange. It is also being developed as an open-source platform, designed to support a wider digital-trade ecosystem rather than lock countries into a single closed system.
That distinction matters. Digitising a form may make one process faster. Building interoperable digital public infrastructure can change how an entire trade system works. The technology behind the project has been tested in Kenya, the UK and parts of Asia. Much like the Automated System for Customs Data developed by UN Trade and Development, the system developed by ADAPT’s technology partner, IOTA, is free for participating countries to adopt.
What is the bigger lesson for African leaders and partners?
The future of African trade will not be decided by policy ambition alone, but by whether governments can build the systems that allow businesses to operate confidently across borders.
ADAPT is still at an early stage, and its success will depend on careful implementation, strong country leadership, private-sector participation and continued alignment across the continent. But it addresses one of the central delivery challenges facing the AfCFTA: how to turn a historic agreement into a practical trading reality.
The next phase of African economic integration will depend on the systems, institutions and infrastructure that make cross-border trade work in practice.
Digital infrastructure may not always attract the same attention as major summits or trade announcements. But it is increasingly the machinery through which trade and economic integration happen – providing jobs and incomes for millions of people.
This was originally posted to Institute Insights, where TBI experts bring to life our work enabling political leaders to drive change that transforms lives.