Since colonial times, African trade has been dominated by the export of commodities to more developed countries outside the continent. Raw materials such as petroleum from Angola, lithium from the Democratic Republic of Congo and copper from Zambia are transformed into higher-value products in Europe, Asia and North America.
With limited possibilities to turn them into finished products, African countries lose out – cocoa producers such as Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana capture less than 7% of the value of the $120bn global chocolate industry. In 2021, Nigeria, one of Africa’s biggest exporters of crude oil, imported $11.3bn worth of refined petroleum products from countries such as the Netherlands and Belgium.
Meanwhile, trade between African countries is low. In 2017, trade with other African countries accounted for 16.6% of African countries’ total exports, while the comparative figure in Europe was 68.1%.
