This article is part of a Synergies series on African trade and sustainability priorities and interests. Any views and opinions expressed are those of the author(s).

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Africa’s green transition is not taking place on a blank policy canvas. Nor is it being designed or implemented in one room. Decisions about investment, infrastructure, skills, technology, and production are made by different agencies, and at different levels. When those links are weak, important stakeholders are left out and industrial policy frameworks are pulled in different directions.

What became clearer from the discussions surrounding the Fourteenth World Trade Organization (WTO) Ministerial Conference in Yaoundé was a growing determination to move beyond a predominantly reactive posture towards rules and priorities developed elsewhere. The message: Africa should exercise greater influence over its direction and terms by anchoring negotiations in national development strategies, regional integration, and continental priorities.

Climate change is being treated not only as an existential threat requiring mitigation and adaptation, but also as a force reshaping industrial policy, investment decisions, and access to export markets. In this regard, agency is visible in who identifies the priorities, who finances them, how the resulting choices are implemented and whether African institutions can carry them into external rule-making processes. Participation in the global trading system has not automatically delivered structural transformation, and, although market access remains essential, it cannot generate industrial transformation without productive capacity, finance, and effective institutions. 

For trade and climate cooperation to reinforce, rather than displace, Africa’s development priorities, national industrial strategies, regional value chains, continental frameworks, bilateral arrangements, and positions at the WTO should be treated as connected parts of a common development project.

This produces two related priorities. In the short term, African countries must manage the costs and market access consequences of emerging sustainability requirements. In the longer term, they must invest in the productive and institutional capacity needed to shape the green transition on their own terms. Connecting these dots across different levels of policymaking is the pathway between them. It is also how agency is built: through expertise, evidence, institutional relationships, and sustained links between national, regional, and continental actors.

For many African producers, the trade and sustainability agenda is first encountered not as an opportunity to shape new industries, but as a succession of requirements designed in major export markets. The European Union’s Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM), Deforestation Regulation, Batteries Regulation, and Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence Directive all extend environmental and social requirements beyond Europe through trade and value chains. They require governments and firms to develop emissions data, traceability systems and cleaner production capacity. While these objectives are not inherently opposed to African interests, the methods of implementation risk relocating the exercise of agency downstream: where governments and producers must contest, interpret, or comply with the measures after important design choices have already been made. Research on the application of environmental supply chain regulation to Ghana’s cocoa sector, for example, identifies risks arising from fragmented supply chains and an emphasis on formal compliance rather than locally grounded substantive change.

The immediate priority is therefore is to decide strategically where adaptation is necessary, where flexibilities, equivalence, and external support should be sought, and where investments in compliance can strengthen domestic productive capabilities. This means that where possible, emissions measurement and traceability should form part of durable national and regional infrastructure that can support productive capabilities.

Connecting these dots begins at country and regional level. To illustrate, for Egypt and Algeria, whose exports include carbon-intensive industrial products, the EU’s CBAM presents an immediate concern. On the other hand, across parts of East, West, and Central Africa, the EU Deforestation Regulation may be more pressing because cocoa, coffee, rubber, and other agricultural exports depend heavily on smallholders and fragmented supply chains. For Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), which are seeking to move from mineral extraction into battery precursors and manufacturing, the EU Batteries Regulation may shape the standards governing entry into EU-linked battery value chains, particularly through its carbon footprint, traceability, and supply chain due diligence requirements. These differences demonstrate that African agency is exercised from different economic starting points and through different national and regional priorities.

Bilateral arrangements must likewise be assessed against regional and continental objectives so that short-term market access decisions do not fragment regional value chains or restrict future industrial policy choices. An arrangement that offers an immediate national advantage may also change tariffs, standards, investment incentives, or production patterns for neighboring economies.

The East African Court of Justice (EACJ) has previously found Kenya in violation of its regional obligations by negotiating a proposed free trade agreement and adopting a wheat certification memorandum with the United States without notifying and involving the other East African Community (EAC) partner states. While the judgment is under appeal, and discussions are ongoing, the underlying principle, which requires regional involvement while bilateral negotiations are underway, cannot be overlooked. This is not the only time the EACJ has addressed the issue. In November 2025, the court issued an interim order staying the implementation of the Kenya-EU Economic Partnership Agreement, pending the determination of the substantive reference. Beyond the tensions bilateral agreements pose for regional relations, such agreements must be assessed against Kenya’s own development priorities. Do the infrastructure and technology commitments benefit production beyond the immediate point of entry to strengthening domestic productive capabilities?

Even where two countries identify complementary resources and agree on a cross-border industrial objective, at least three questions must be addressed: (i) How does the project connect with their national industrial and investment strategies? (ii) How will producers and suppliers elsewhere in the region participate? (iii) How will infrastructure, incentives, and standards be coordinated? 

The DRC–Zambia battery and electric-vehicle special economic zone project offers a more concrete, though incomplete, illustration of what connected bilateralism could look like. Under the Framework Agreement both countries seek to combine their mineral endowments and industrial capabilities to move from extraction to battery precursors, batteries, and eventually electric vehicles. However, the value of this project will depend on whether the zones perform mutually reinforcing functions within a shared value chain. Otherwise, they risk reproducing the enclave model associated with many African special economic zones, whereby fiscal incentives attract investment without generating durable supplier linkages, skills development, or technological upgrading. To avoid such an outcome, the initiative should be anchored in national priorities for value addition, employment, and technological learning. Furthermore, the South African Development Community (SADC), Common market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), and African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) frameworks widen the sourcing, production, and market opportunities.

Beyond bilateral and regional commitments, unilateral type preference programmes exacerbate the issue. For example, the lapse of the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) in September 2025, and the retroactive reauthorization to December 2026, demonstrates the vulnerability of industrial activity organized around market access controlled and periodically renewed elsewhere. In this regard, while the short-term priority is to protect existing access, investment, and employment, the longer-term objective must be to convert that access into domestic and regional productive capacity.

Kenya’s recently concluded Cotton, Textile and Apparel Policy, for example, provides an opportunity to connect apparel exports to investment in cotton, spinning, weaving, and other backward linkages. Without that connection, market access can create employment while still leaving the structure of production dependent on imported inputs and external preference cycles.

National strategies are where agency becomes concrete. Here, sectors are selected, incentives designed, financing directed, and choices made about infrastructure, procurement, skills, and technology. For example, Rwanda’s Industrial Policy identifies priority manufacturing and service sectors, South Africa’s policy aligns trade instruments and incentives with renewable energy manufacturing and green industrialization, and Kenya is currently developing its own Industrial Policy to shape investment in mapped out priority sectors. Naturally, these national processes should treat relevant regional and AfCFTA commitments as design considerations from the beginning, and, regional opportunities should similarly inform the sectors selected for national support. While not every national priority must become a continental value chain, national strategies should identify where regional uptake and or shared infrastructure could produce outcomes that no country can achieve alone.

The same connection must extend to Geneva. This is especially because despite the coalitions that have strengthened African voices, longstanding development priorities have remained modest. While stronger links between capitals, regional economic communities (RECs), and Geneva cannot, by themselves, overcome differences in market power or the bargaining advantages of large economies, they can, however, address one key weakness: the separation of negotiating positions from domestic policy and productive realities. National evidence should shape these proposals and, in turn, developments at the WTO should return to capitals to shape industrial policy choices.

Within the framework of the Abuja Treaty is the requirement to harmonize industrialization policies, joint industrial projects, and institutions for financing multinational African projects. It also contemplated a Protocol on Industry. In this context, the proposed Protocol on Industrial Policy and Development is meant to provide an operational layer between market integration and production by creating procedures through which national and REC strategies are made visible and where cross-border effects are negotiated. At best, this framework would connect the AfCFTA market access rules with the necessary productive capabilities. Devoid of a clearly defined coordinating function, however, it would add another continental declaration to an already crowded industrial policy architecture. 

Negotiators therefore need clarity on the specific cross-border concerns that would be addressed, and why such concerns may not be managed through national or REC action. This would properly distinguish those activities that genuinely require continental coordination from those that are better off at national or regional level. The protocol could also create a process for mapping national and REC industrial strategies and gathering evidence from the agencies responsible for implementing them, thus allowing the green dimension of Africa’s industrial agenda to be shaped from the ground up.

The shared long-term objective remains to leverage the green transition to strengthen productive capacity, deepen regional value chains, and increase Africa’s rule-making influence. The proposed Protocol on Industrial Policy and Development is therefore a test of whether African countries can connect national industrial strategies, regional production, continental frameworks, bilateral engagement, and WTO positions without undermining their own differences. 

By connecting these dots, Africa can turn the immediate green transition pressures into building the long-term productive and institutional capabilities on its own terms.

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Janet Macharia, Trade Negotiations & Investment Forum; Teaching Fellow, Strathmore Law School; Fellow, Remaking Trade Project.

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Synergies is an online platform featuring expert commentary and opinions curated by TESS. We foster dialogue and incubate ideas on how to shape a global trading system that effectively addresses global environmental crises and advances sustainable development. Synergies draws on perspectives from leading experts and practitioners across policy communities from around the world. We cultivate solutions-oriented policy analysis for a sustainable future.

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