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Across Africa, women are among the most active economic actors, running businesses, producing agricultural goods, sustaining markets, and facilitating trade across borders. Yet despite their central role in economic life, women remain largely excluded from the structures where economic power is shaped: formal trade systems, industrial value chains, and financial institutions.
As Africa advances the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), the largest free trade area in the world by number of participating countries, the role of women in shaping the continent’s economic architecture becomes increasingly important. While governments negotiate trade protocols and regional economic frameworks, millions of African women are already facilitating commerce through informal cross-border trading networks that sustain local economies and regional supply chains.
However, a significant disconnect remains between these grassroots economic realities and the formal policy systems designed to govern trade.
Women traders frequently face structural barriers, including limited access to finance, restrictive regulatory environments, inadequate trade information, and challenges at border posts. At the same time, women-led enterprises often struggle to scale due to difficulties accessing capital, procurement systems, and industrial value chains.
Addressing these barriers is not only a matter of gender equality, it is a matter of economic strategy.
When women are economically empowered, communities become more resilient, livelihoods improve, and opportunities expand for families and young people. Economic inclusion therefore has the potential to reduce vulnerability to instability, irregular migration, and social tensions.
As Africa seeks to strengthen intra-continental trade, industrialisation, and economic sovereignty, the question is no longer whether women should participate in the economy. The question is whether Africa’s emerging economic architecture will recognise women as central drivers of its transformation.
Join us this Friday for Episode 10 of the Women in Geopolitics Debates as we explore how women traders, entrepreneurs, policymakers, and financial institutions can work together to unlock Africa’s economic potential, and whether economic inclusion can become a pathway to greater stability across the continent.
???? Friday, 13 March 2026
???? 11:00 SAST | 12:00 EAT | 10:00 WAT
???? Virtual (Zoom)
