Why AfCFTA's Digital Trade Protocol Needs More Than Policy - Independent Newspaper Nigeria
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) represents one of the most ambitious undertakings in modern trade history. At its heart lies a bold promise to unify 54 countries under a single market, enabling freer movement of goods, services, and capital. But as economies digitize and more businesses move online, a parallel challenge emerges. How do we make digital trade across such a diverse continent seamless, secure, and scalable?
The AfCFTA’s Digital Trade Protocol is a pivotal response to this question. By introducing frameworks for e-payments, digital identity, cross-border data flow, and cybersecurity, it lays the foundation for a continent where digital transactions can move as freely as physical goods.
Yet, while the spotlight is often on the protocol’s headline ambitions including, e-commerce, fintech expansion, and startup growth, there’s a less visible but equally critical layer that demands attention, compliance infrastructure.
Just as payments and logistics form the physical and financial “rails” of trade, compliance is emerging as the trust rail, the layer that ensures businesses can operate across borders with clarity, accountability, and legitimacy. And without this rail firmly in place, even the most progressive policy risks becoming policy on paper.
The Digital Trade Protocol, adopted in 2023 as part of the AfCFTA’s expanding legal framework, aims to set the rules of engagement for how African countries will participate in the digital economy. Its scope is wide-reaching, covering everything from e-transactions and electronic signatures to personal data protection, cross-border data flows, cybersecurity, and consumer protection.
In essence, the protocol is designed to create a unified digital market by reducing regulatory fragmentation, foster trust and interoperability between national systems, enable African startups and SMEs to trade and scale across borders without navigating a maze of conflicting laws, and attract foreign investment through a predictable and transparent digital governance environment.
For digital businesses, especially startups, the protocol promises the possibility of “scaling continentally” rather than country by country. It’s a vision where a fintech in Kenya, a logistics platform in Ghana, or a SaaS provider in South Africa can all operate seamlessly across markets with shared regulatory standards and simplified cross-border operations.
Policy opens the door, but infrastructure determines who can walk through it, this is the challenge facing Africa’s digital trade future. While the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol lays out a vision for seamless, secure, cross-border commerce, there is little clarity around the systems required to implement it on the ground.
Compliance infrastructure refers to the tools, platforms, and processes that help businesses align with legal, regulatory, and operational requirements across jurisdictions including, digital identity verification and trust services, business registration interoperability, cross-border data protection compliance, taxation, invoicing, and audit-ready reporting, and licensing, certification, and automated regulatory updates
Right now, most African startups and SMEs operate in silos, navigating disconnected regulatory environments, relying on manual compliance workflows, and facing uncertainty about their legal standing when entering new markets. For a protocol like AfCFTA’s Digital Trade framework to succeed, that must change.
This gap creates critical risks like exclusion where smaller players may be shut out of continental opportunities due to complexity or cost, informality as businesses may continue to operate informally to avoid friction, undermining the goals of digital trust and standardization, and implementation failure where even the best-designed policies risk stalling if execution mechanisms aren’t in place.
To build a truly borderless digital economy, Africa needs more than harmonized rules. It needs a new layer of rails, digital systems that translate those rules into everyday business tools, usable by startups, platforms, and local service providers alike.
As a board member at Venture Reg, a platform focused on streamlining company compliance and regulatory access across African markets, I have seen firsthand how fragmented infrastructure can stall even the most promising businesses. Many startups across the continent are ready to scale, but face barriers that have little to do with product-market fit and everything to do with navigating opaque legal systems, duplicative registration processes, and country-specific reporting burdens.
From this vantage point, the promise of AfCFTA’s Digital Trade Protocol feels both exciting and urgent. We don’t need to imagine the benefits of harmonized compliance infrastructure; we are already building toward it. But the gap between ambition and execution is real. There is still no unified way for African businesses to verify trust credentials, share audit trails across borders, or stay ahead of evolving digital trade laws in real time.
The success of digital trade under AfCFTA will hinge on whether platforms like ours, and many others across the continent, are empowered to build infrastructure that scales trust, not just transactions. That means more than regulatory alignment. It requires investment, interoperability, and political will to back new, open digital systems that lower the barrier to entry for every African entrepreneur.
If AfCFTA’s digital trade ambitions are to be more than symbolic, the continent must prioritize building the infrastructure that makes policy executable. That means treating compliance infrastructure as essential for the digital economy.
For policymakers, this starts with investing in the systems that make digital trade work in practice. Digital ID networks, interoperable business registries, and regtech platforms must be seen as core components of trade infrastructure, not peripheral concerns. Beyond infrastructure, governments should develop regional trust frameworks that allow businesses to verify and share compliance credentials securely across borders.
For founders and digital platforms, now is the time to shift from thinking only in terms of B2B or B2C to considering a new layer, Business to Regulator (B2R). Whether it’s real-time reporting tools, compliance automation features, or embedded licensing protocols, the next generation of African digital products must bake regulatory interaction into their design.
For investors and ecosystem enablers, the opportunity lies in supporting the builders behind the scenes. Too often, funding and visibility flow toward high-growth sectors like e-commerce and payments, while the infrastructure players, those solving for trust, interoperability, and compliance, remain under-capitalized. Yet these are the companies that will make cross-border trade truly functional.
The AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol gives us the map. What we need now is the machinery, the systems, the tools, and the incentives, to turn that map into movement.
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Ikechi Nzeako
Ikechi Nzeako is a journalist with Independent Newspapers Limited. He is a graduate of the University of Ibadan and he is interested in politics, history, economy and sports. He writes on small business, entrepreneurship, training, employment, start-ups, and general business.
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