Innovate, trade and grow: Africa’s growth agenda in the boardroom

RUMBIDZAI MASHAYAHANYA

Intra-African trade is projected to reach US$230bn in 2026, up roughly 10% from the previous year, as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) moves from signing agreements to actual implementation.

The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System is now operational and expected to reduce foreign-exchange costs on continental trade by as much as 30%.

A digital trade protocol has also been adopted. Fifty-four countries and 1.4 billion people now sit within a single agreement that, on paper, is the world’s largest free trade area by membership.

It is, genuinely, a growth story. It is also, on its own, an incomplete one.

The missing ingredient is not policy. It is capability, specifically, boardroom capability.

Africa’s exports remain hundreds of billions of dollars below their potential, constrained not primarily by tariffs but by the accumulation of ordinary operational friction: slow customs procedures, inconsistent product standards, unpredictable informal payments at borders and incomplete rules-of-origin negotiations in textiles, processed foods and industrial goods.

Research into AfCFTA implementation has been blunt about this, noting that the combined effect of non-tariff barriers can outweigh the tariffs the agreement was designed to remove. Governments can sign a continental trade agreement. They cannot, by themselves, make a company ready to operate profitably and compliantly across a dozen different regulatory regimes.

That readiness starts in the boardroom or it does not exist at all.

It is worth being specific about how modest the early results remain. The Guided Trade Initiative, designed to allow willing countries to begin trading under the new rules before every technical negotiation is complete, has demonstrated that the infrastructure can work. Kenya, Rwanda, Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Mauritius, Tanzania and Tunisia were among the early participants.

Yet the volumes traded under the initiative remain small relative to the continent’s overall trade. Southern Africa, the region arguably best placed to lead given its established trade infrastructure, is still working out how quickly it wants to move.

The gap between what AfCFTA makes possible and what companies are actually doing with it remains wide and it will not close itself.

The challenge is reflected in the boardroom itself. A recent survey described what researchers called an alarming paradox: nearly 85% of directors said they were confident in their board’s overall performance.

Yet when asked about specific, live challenges, including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence oversight and cross-border risk, confidence fell to 35%.

Almost nine in 10 directors acknowledged that their organisations needed to do considerably more to close these gaps, while four in 10 said their boards still lacked a formal approach to environmental, social and governance issues.

This is not a picture of boards unwilling to grow. It is a picture of boards whose confidence has outpaced their readiness.

That may be more dangerous. Unwarranted confidence is precisely what allows organisations to expand into new markets before they have built the governance capabilities required to survive there.

This is the conversation the 12th CEO Africa Annual Roundtable will take up when it convenes in Cape Town from October 6 to 10 under the theme, The Future of Africa, Innovate, Trade and Grow.

It is a fitting theme and a slightly dangerous one if “innovate” and “trade” receive more attention than “grow” deserves.

Ambition is not scarce on this continent. Execution discipline at board level is.

Any serious conversation about the future of African business must therefore treat these as two separate questions, because the data increasingly suggests they are.

Consider what governing genuine cross-border growth requires.

A board expanding operations from Harare into Lusaka, Nairobi or Accra is not simply managing a larger version of the business it already knows. It is managing currency exposure across multiple regimes, data moving across borders under a new digital trade protocol, tax and regulatory frameworks that differ significantly from one jurisdiction to another, and reputational risks that travel faster than the goods themselves.

None of this is theoretical. It is precisely the terrain AfCFTA’s implementation reports identify as the difficult part — the part that will determine whether trade volumes actually grow or remain stuck at the modest levels seen under the early trading arrangements designed to prove the system works.

Three shifts could meaningfully narrow the gap between Africa’s growth ambitions and boardroom capability.

First, expansion decisions need genuine governance sign-off before capital moves. Boards must interrogate the regulatory, currency, tax and compliance risks of entering a new market rather than approving a strategy paper and leaving the detail to management.

Second, cross-border data flows and digital trade infrastructure deserve board-level ownership. They should receive the same attention that serious companies now give domestic cybersecurity. A trade protocol that moves information across multiple jurisdictions is fundamentally a governance issue before it becomes a technology issue.

Third, boards need leaders with genuine cross-border experience on their succession shortlists. A leadership pipeline built almost entirely around domestic experience will struggle to govern operations in markets it does not understand from the inside.

None of this argues against Africa’s growth agenda. The opposite is true.

The trade numbers are real. The payment infrastructure is increasingly functional. And the opportunity before African businesses is larger than at almost any point in the continent’s recent history.

But opportunities of this scale reward organisations capable of governing their way through them — and quietly punish those that cannot, regardless of how confident their boards felt at the outset.

When delegates gather in Cape Town from October 6 to 10 to discuss innovating, trading and growing, the more useful question for every director in the room and every director reading from a distance is not whether Africa’s growth story is real.

It plainly is.

The question is whether their own board could withstand the scrutiny and complexity of operating in three additional markets by this time next year.

For many boards, based on what the data already shows, the honest answer is: not yet.

Closing that capability gap deserves at least as much attention as the trade agreement that made the ambition possible in the first place.

Rumbidzai Mashayahanya is the Head of Business Development and Communications at CEO Africa Roundtable. She writes here in her personal capacity.