Policymakers, financiers and business leaders from across Africa gathered in Cape Town on March 11 to confront the structural barriers holding back intra-African commerce, with the continent’s leaders pushing for policy harmonisation and a far greater mobilisation of private capital to make trade integration a practical reality.
The second edition of the Access Bank Africa Trade Conference (ATC 2026), held under the theme “Turning Vision into Velocity: Building Africa’s Trade Ecosystem for Real-World Impact,” brought together senior officials from government, finance, logistics and technology at the Cape Town International Convention Centre in South Africa.
Roosevelt Ogbonna, Managing Director and Chief Executive Officer of Access Bank Plc, opened the conference by acknowledging that Africa still accounts for a disproportionately small share of global trade, with fragmented corridors and structural bottlenecks continuing to constrain cross-border commerce, particularly for smaller businesses.
The African Development Bank’s (AfDB) Director General for Southern Africa, Kennedy Mbekeani, called for greater private capital mobilisation to finance critical infrastructure, noting that many African governments face limited fiscal space and overstretched balance sheets.
Ghana’s Minister for Trade, Agribusiness and Industry, Elizabeth Ofosu-Ajare, who participated in the ministerial panel, argued that the continent’s trade challenge is not a shortage of policy frameworks but a failure of coordinated execution. She said Africa’s chief obstacle is implementing existing policies in a harmonised manner, and added that countries must adopt mutual recognition frameworks and harmonise certification processes to allow trade to move more efficiently across borders.
Zambia’s Minister of Commerce, Trade and Industry, Chipoka Mulenga, stressed that African countries must craft coherent and consistent policies that work across national boundaries rather than compete with one another, arguing that leveraging comparative advantages is the more productive path forward.
Botswana’s Minister of Trade and Entrepreneurship, Tiroeaone Ntsima, said governments must focus on enabling businesses and investors to lead economic growth, and reframed his country’s geography from landlocked to “land-linked,” describing cross-border trade corridors as instruments of regional opportunity.
Ogbonna closed with a direct challenge to delegates, warning that the conference must translate its discussions into a concrete movement rather than another forum of unimplemented resolutions.
