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) and do not necessarily reflect those of TESS or any of its partner organizations or funders.

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Many discussions at London Climate Action Week 2026 started from a common concern: what happens when the assumptions that underpinned global cooperation become less certain?

From the viewpoint of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat in Accra, the picture looks slightly different.

While many parts of the world are debating how to preserve cooperation, 54 African countries have spent the last three years negotiating, implementing, and operationalizing new continental rules on trade, investment, and industrial development.

So perhaps the most interesting question is not whether cooperation is still possible. Rather, it is why Africa is choosing to deepen cooperation at a time when geopolitical tensions, economic security concerns, and competing industrial strategies are pulling much of the world in the opposite direction.

Against this fragmentation, it is useful to look at what we are building in response. Africa's experience has lessons that extend well beyond our continent.

When analysts in Brussels or London talk about Africa and the green transition, the conversation tends to be about exposure—to carbon border measures (including the European Union's CBAM), to ESG screening, or to standards set elsewhere. That is a real conversation, to which we will return, but it is not how it is discussed at home, where the conversation is about competitive advantage. Africa has some of the best solar and wind resources in the world, the largest share of the minerals the energy transition needs, and a continental market of 1.5 billion people that did not exist as a single market three years ago. Industries that need cheap, reliable, renewable power are looking for somewhere to invest serious capital. We believe that is Africa.

One reason we are able to think this way is that Africa is no longer approaching trade, investment, industrialization, and climate action as separate conversations. Through the AfCFTA Protocol on Investment, for instance, African countries have established a continental framework that links investment promotion, facilitation, sustainable development, and climate objectives within a single architecture.

That may sound technical, but the practical implication is significant. It means creating a common framework that helps direct investment towards the industries we want to build, rather than hoping investment patterns emerge by chance.

That is the premise behind the Africa Green Industrialisation Initiative (AGII), which African Heads of State mandated the AfCFTA Secretariat to help coordinate. It works through clusters—which warrants a proper explanation as it is a genuinely useful way to think about industrial investment. A cluster is three things tied together in the same place: renewable power generation, an industrial process that needs that power, and a committed buyer for what gets produced. You do not get investable projects by building power plants and hoping industry shows up later; and you do not get industry to commit without power they can actually rely on. So both are designed at once. That is the insight: derisking by sequencing things together rather than separately.

This is not easy and the real money may not have arrived yet. There is currently a lot of pledged climate finance in the world and not many bankable projects to invest in—that gap is the actual constraint, more than the absence of capital. And the gap is not only about money. A lot of it is much less glamorous than that: it is a law that has been updated on paper but not yet in how an investment agency actually behaves; it is a one-stop shop that exists on a website but does not actually talk to the three other ministries an investor has to deal with; it is a climate target that lives in a strategy document but never made it into the incentive structure that decides where capital actually goes. 

One lesson we have learned through this work is that fragmentation is rarely a global problem before it is a domestic one.

We often speak about fragmentation between trading blocs, competing standards, or geopolitical rivalries. Yet investors are usually delayed long before they encounter a foreign tariff. They are delayed by institutions that do not coordinate, permits that move through disconnected systems, and policies that pursue different objectives without speaking to one another.

In that sense, the challenge facing global trade governance today is not entirely different from the challenge facing national investment governance. Ultimately, both are coordination problems.

That is one reason the AfCFTA Secretariat is mandated to support implementation of its protocols. Through this mandate, we enable governments to translate commitments on paper into functioning investment ecosystems in practice. On investment, for example, the objective is to ensure that the institutions responsible for investment promotion, facilitation, industrial policy, and climate action are working towards the same outcome.

That effort is increasingly being applied to project preparation under AGII, helping move green industrial clusters in areas such as green hydrogen, critical minerals processing, fertilizer, and low-carbon construction materials from concept to investment readiness. This work is being undertaken alongside partners including the African Development Bank, Afreximbank, and African commercial banks, building on financing commitments exceeding $100 billion announced in Addis Ababa in 2025.

The minerals processing point matters. The International Energy Agency projects that by 2035, three countries could still control over 80 percent of refined critical mineral supply. That should focus our minds. Africa holds a huge share of the deposits the energy transition needs. The question is whether we stay a raw material exporter inside someone else’s refining and pricing system, or whether we use the scale a continental market gives us to actually move up that chain ourselves. That is not a hypothetical; it is the difference the cluster model is built to make.

The Namibia green iron project is the clearest example of what this looks like once it is running: production built from day one to meet the carbon standards the rest of the world is setting, rather than scrambling to retrofit for them later. That is the difference between adapting to someone else’s rules and building ahead of them.

The United Kingdom's carbon border mechanism comes into force on 1 January 2027, covering aluminium, cement, fertilizer, hydrogen, iron, and steel. These are sectors where a number of African exporters have genuine exposure. The United Kingdom is currently working with the European Union to link their two emissions trading schemes, so that trade between them in these same sectors can be mutually exempted before the United Kingdom’s mechanism even starts. 

That is a sensible objective between close trading partners. But it also points to a broader question. The debate around carbon border measures is often framed as a choice between climate ambition and development. That is not the right framing.

The real question is whether climate policy can create credible pathways for industrialization in developing economies. No global transition will be politically sustainable if entire regions are expected to remain suppliers of raw materials while value addition, refining, and advanced manufacturing continue to happen elsewhere.

Africa's response has been to build its own framework. Through the AfCFTA Protocol on Investment and initiatives such as AGII, we are actively working at directing investment towards low-carbon industrial development, renewable-powered manufacturing, and regional value chains.

In that sense, Africa is not simply adapting to the rules of the green transition. We are helping shape what a just and industrially inclusive transition should look like. That is a trade conversation worth having properly, and it is one a continental investment protocol with climate provisions already built into it puts us in a stronger position to have.

For many years, Africa was discussed primarily as a participant in global trade. Today, Africa is increasingly becoming a designer of trade, investment, and industrial policy solutions. For many years, Africa was largely expected to adjust to rules designed elsewhere. Today, through the AfCFTA and related continental initiatives, Africa is demonstrating that it can also contribute to designing the frameworks that govern trade, investment, and industrial development. That shift matters; not only for Africa, but for the future of global economic cooperation itself.

Many of these challenges—climate alignment, industrial transformation, critical minerals, investment facilitation, and regional value chains—cannot be solved by countries acting alone. They require cooperation. And if cooperation is indeed becoming harder, then we should pay close attention to places where it is still being built. 

That is what the AfCFTA represents. Evidence that meaningful cooperation remains possible. And that it can be built around development, industrialization, and shared prosperity. We have the opportunity to build that next chapter together; not around Africa, but with Africa.

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Roslyn Ng'eno is Senior Investment Expert, AfCFTA Secretariat.

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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.

The Executive Editor is Fabrice Lehmann.

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