By Nellyana Mmanyi, Corporate Banking Director, Absa Bank Tanzania

Global trade is being reshaped by geopolitics, as supply chains fragment and new alliances redraw the map of commerce. For Africa, this is not just disruption, it’s a strategic opening. In this pivotal decade, as companies diversify sourcing and rethink trade routes, the continent, particularly East Africa, is emerging as a critical connector between global markets.

Converting this moment into meaningful growth will depend on reducing friction, improving access to trade finance and enabling businesses to move with speed and certainty. This is where banks can play a fundamental role.

As change interrupts existing ways of trade, there’s a palpable shift from efficiency to resilience. Corporates are diversifying their supply chains, reducing single country dependence, for example, on China. They’re favouring nearshoring and friendshoring, expanding into Southern East Asia and India. Trade routes are becoming more regional and more complex with multiple sourcing and transit options built in to manage geopolitical risk.

More corridor-based trade routes are emerging. Trading based on proximity to geopolitical markets is increasing. For example, importing fuel from the Middle East to Tanzania is difficult, with significant delays because of logistical issues related to Iran.

Africa is increasingly acting as both a production base and a trade connector with the Middle East and Asia. We see this in agriculture, business, manufacturing and the transit trade which is supported by improving port infrastructure and growing regional integration.

East Africa is no longer just a future opportunity—it is already emerging as a strategic trade bridge, with the region firmly positioned as one of the continent’s key growth hubs. The increasing interest from major international and regional banks seeking to establish or expand their presence here is a clear indication of where Africa’s growth momentum lies.

From a logistics and trade perspective, East Africa plays a pivotal gateway role. The Port of Dar es Salaam, for example, is a critical entry point supporting land-linked markets such as the DRC, Zambia, Uganda, and Rwanda. This importance is further reinforced by ongoing investments in key transport corridors, including Tanzania’s Central Corridor and Kenya’s Northern Corridor, which continue to enhance connectivity and facilitate trade across the region.

However, pragmatic barriers still prevent businesses from fully capitalising on these new trade opportunities. Despite the momentum, the execution challenges remain significant. The main constraints are logistical inefficiencies, regulatory fragmentation like non-trade barriers across African markets, customs inefficiencies and inconsistent policies in East Africa. Slow implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) at an operational level is a concern and foreign exchange volatility and market access to trade finance, particularly for SMEs, remain an obstacle. While there is demand for their goods, they struggle with execution across borders. Logistical inefficiencies in terms of infrastructure, like port communication, railroad inefficiencies, potholes and a lack of tarmac, coupled with high inland transport costs, all hinder successful trade.

Financial institutions can support clients in navigating these complexities. To be successful in a competitive market, banks must differentiate themselves by moving beyond transactions to end-to-end trade enablement. At Absa, we are seeing growing demand from corporates for integrated cross-border banking support that combines trade finance, foreign exchange solutions and regional market expertise. Clients are looking not just for funding, but for banking partners that can help them navigate increasingly complex trade corridors with speed and certainty. Banks must therefore offer not just vanilla letters of credit, or overdraft facilities, but flexible trade finance and structured trade solutions.

Speed as a differentiator is critical. Ultimately the bank that moves fastest wins the client.

Looking ahead, multiple factors will determine whether Africa truly captures this moment or misses the golden opportunity. Success will depend on five factors.

Firstly, the implementation of the AfCFTA is paramount, to move from policy to real trade flows and reducing non-tariff barriers.

Secondly, infrastructure delivery, for ports, rail and energy investment, must translate into efficiency and not just capacity.

We need to improve access to capital by bridging the trade finance gap and supporting the SME-sized corporates to upscale regionally.

Fourth, is an industrialisation focus and a shift from raw export materials to value added production and the involvement of regional supply chains.

Lastly, institutional coordination in terms of alignment between government, banks and the private sector is critical. We need policy consistency and investor confidence.

Africa, East Africa in particular, has a remarkable opportunity to position itself in global trade, not only in terms of its excellent existing market, but as a connector and a production hub. Success won’t be automatic. It will depend on the speed of execution, access to capital and the ability of banking institutions to actively enable clients across the trade value chain. The opportunity is real, but it won’t wait.

By Loffie Brandt, Sector Executive for Agriculture at Absa AgriBusiness

For a long time, agricultural risk in Africa was understood through a relatively familiar set of pressures, whether around rainfall and weather patterns, commodity prices, input costs, access to finance, or the practical realities of moving products through supply chains that often struggled even under normal conditions. Difficult, certainly, but still manageable within a system whose participants broadly understood its rhythms. What has changed, particularly over the past decade, is that the risk environment surrounding African agriculture has become far more interconnected and far less predictable.

Take climate change, for instance. In some parts of the continent, rain now arrives heavily over very short periods before disappearing again. At the same time, floods, mid-season droughts, and highly localised weather disruptions have started appearing much more frequently. Many producers now factor some form of climate disruption into almost every season, partly because conditions can shift dramatically even across relatively short distances and partly because the timing itself has become far more difficult to anticipate consistently from one year to the next.

The same interconnectedness applies to geopolitical risk as well. The conflict in the Middle East has already shown how quickly events far outside the continent can feed back into African agriculture through higher freight costs and shipping disruptions across key export routes. For exporters already operating on tight margins and highly time-sensitive supply chains, those disruptions carry immediate commercial consequences because even relatively short delays can affect pricing, quality and market access simultaneously.

The pressure point many farmers are feeling most acutely at the moment, and likely will continue feeling for some time, is the rise in input costs, particularly around fertiliser and energy.

Urea prices moved above $700 per tonne earlier this year, with upward pressure spreading across other fertiliser categories as supply chains tightened and global uncertainty filtered further into agricultural input markets. Producers who had not secured supply early suddenly found themselves entering planting periods under far more pressure around pricing, particularly as higher crude prices also pushed fuel costs sharply upwards across parts of the continent at exactly the point where diesel demand typically begins accelerating during planting and harvesting cycles.

The reality is that many of these pressures no longer behave like temporary disruptions that businesses can simply wait out until conditions normalise again: the operating environment itself has changed. More producers are starting to recognise that resilience now depends less on getting through a difficult season and more on building operations capable of absorbing repeated instability over longer periods of time.

The difficult reality now is that meaningful adjustments are often hard to make midway through difficult periods because agricultural cycles do not move at the same speed as geopolitical events or commodity markets. Much depends on what is being produced and how exposed producers are to changing input costs or weakening prices. Grain producers, for example, are currently operating in a global market carrying high stock levels, which continues placing downward pressure on prices even as fertiliser and fuel costs rise.

Other producers face different pressures altogether, particularly where export markets tighten or demand weakens unexpectedly, forcing businesses to look for alternative markets or different routes to market, often within very short timeframes.

But part of the challenge is that difficult times rarely create only downside pressure. They also create periods of temporary dislocation where opportunities emerge unexpectedly for businesses capable of moving quickly enough to respond to them. Increasingly, resilience in agriculture depends not only on surviving volatility, but on maintaining enough liquidity and operational agility to adapt when conditions change suddenly in either direction.

And that is why cash flow is really at the heart of resilience. That may come through retained cash inside the business itself or through the ability to access external funding when needed. At Absa AgriBusiness, we are increasingly seeing producers prioritise financial flexibility and liquidity as core to their long-term resilience planning. Either way, businesses carrying healthier balance sheets generally retain far more flexibility once markets come under pressure.

Some producers are also leaning more heavily into crop insurance, others into geographic or production diversification. Many have spent the past few years focusing on technology and improving operational efficiency. All these efforts aim to strengthen margins and ultimately generate additional cash flow within the business itself.

None of these decisions remove volatility from agriculture entirely, but they do influence how much room a business has to absorb pressure once conditions become unstable.

As farming conditions become harder to predict through traditional models alone, financial institutions like Absa will increasingly have to rely on far more granular operational data in order to assess risk appropriately and support producers more effectively through volatile cycles. The reality is that large amounts of agricultural data are already being generated across farms every season, whether around yields, planting conditions, weather patterns, input usage, or production practices. The bigger challenge is in how that information is actually incorporated into funding and risk-assessment models in ways that create practical value for producers.

African agriculture is entering a period where resilience will be determined heavily by access to capital and the ability to remain operational under unstable conditions that may persist for extended periods of time. For producers, financiers, and value-chain participants alike, this requires thinking far more carefully about how businesses are structured before the next disruption arrives, not once it is already underway.

By Johnson Idesoh, Group Chief Information and Technology Officer at Absa

For the past three or four years, the world has lived through what is probably the fastest adoption of a general-purpose technology in modern economic history, with systems becoming embedded in ordinary working life so quickly that companies, governments, and regulators have often struggled to understand the implications at the same speed that employees and consumers were already adapting their behaviour around them. And the economic implications became impossible to ignore almost immediately.

Analysts now estimate that AI could contribute trillions of dollars to global GDP over the next decade, although what has arguably mattered more in the short term is the speed with which corporate behaviour changed once executives realised this was no longer a speculative technology discussion but something capable of altering fundamentals like cost structures, labour requirements, customer engagement models, and competitive positioning simultaneously. And yet there is already a growing sense, particularly among the companies building these systems, that the generative AI boom may ultimately be remembered as only the beginning of a much larger technological transition: agentic AI and autonomous AI agents.

If generative AI introduced systems capable of producing human-like outputs from prompts, agentic AI pushes further into decision-making and execution, allowing software not merely to respond to instructions but to pursue objectives with a degree of independence that earlier systems simply did not possess. In practical terms, rather than asking an AI to complete a single task in isolation, a user might assign a broader objective altogether, such as improving customer onboarding, resolving compliance bottlenecks, or identifying unusual transaction patterns – all areas becoming increasingly relevant for financial institutions such as Absa -after which the system determines for itself which steps need to be taken, which software tools to access, which sub-tasks to prioritise, and how to adapt if the initial approach fails – with minimal human intervention.

The question now is what this next phase of AI means for Africa.

Every major technological transition tends to expose the same underlying divide in the global economy: the countries and companies building foundational systems accumulate disproportionate economic power, while those arriving later often settle into the role of consumers and downstream adopters of technologies designed elsewhere. There is a risk that AI follows a similar pattern, particularly as the infrastructure underpinning it consolidates within a relatively small number of countries and firms.

And yet Africa’s technology story has often unfolded differently from conventional expectations. The continent’s digital evolution has rarely followed the linear path seen in developed economies, partly because institutional gaps and infrastructure constraints created pressure for entirely different forms of innovation. Mobile money, for example, emerged in environments where large segments of the population had never fully entered traditional banking system, a shift Absa has witnessed across multiple African markets over the past decade, and fintech ecosystems expanded rapidly because millions of consumers were already solving practical problems around payments, identity, access, and informality long before regulators and incumbent institutions had fully adjusted to the scale of the shift underway. Combined with one of the youngest populations in the world and accelerating smartphone adoption, this created conditions where new forms of digital behaviour spread far faster than institutional systems were prepared for.

In many respects, Africa became accustomed to technological leapfrogging precisely because existing systems were incomplete, and the same conditions that once spurred mobile-first innovation across the continent may now create an unexpected advantage as AI moves into its next phase.

The countries that will benefit most are likely to be those investing early in people, governance, and locally relevant application. Africa’s young population represents a major advantage here, but only if young people are equipped to shape these technologies themselves rather than experience them primarily as consumers of systems designed elsewhere. It will also require stronger coordination between banks, regulators, telecommunications companies, technology firms, and policymakers as autonomous systems begin integrating more deeply into everyday economic activity, something Absa believes will be critical to ensuring AI adoption remains trusted, secure and inclusive. Most importantly, agentic AI in Africa has to solve African problems in ways that feel practical and grounded, whether around financial inclusion, small business growth, fraud prevention, or expanding access to reliable services.

The generative AI boom may have introduced the world to machine intelligence. The agentic era will test which societies are able to apply it in ways that actually widen human and economic possibility.

By Elvis Ndunguru, Managing Executive, Absa Corporate and Investment Banking, NBC, Tanzania

East Africa, led by Kenya, is emerging as a powerful trade hub driven by infrastructure investment, regional integration and expanding intra-African trade. As a gateway for natural resources, it boasts rare earths, gold, nickel, cobalt, graphite, and other commodities the world needs.

Trade finance is the key to unlocking cross-border flows, supporting SMEs and enabling regional value chains, opening up economic benefits for the region.

As East African trade accelerates, better Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) policies have a stronger bearing on the Tanzanian mainland and Zanzibar, attracting capital movement. As stronger regional demand reshapes trade patterns, increased urbanisation and population growth are driving intra-African trade in fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG), construction materials, and processed goods. Improving macro-stability boosts investability as better fiscal and monetary management emerge.

But global flows demand dependence on solid infrastructure. As corridor-led infrastructure unlocks trade flows, investments in establishing ports, rail, and roads enables trade in new ways. For example, the Port of Mombasa and the Standard Gauge Railway are reducing transit times and connecting important inland markets like Uganda and Rwanda. Regional integration is being driven particularly under the East African Community (EAC) and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), resulting in lowered tariff and non-tariff barriers.

Between South Tanzania and North Kenya, strategically placed ports improve both inter- and intra-continental trade flow. To bolster regional connectivity, Tanzania will spend 12 trillion shilling (TZS) on port expansions. Meanwhile, the $1.4 billion Tazara (Tanzania-Zambia Railway Authority) Railway rehabilitation is underway. Kenya is investing in rail, and a new fuel pipeline is being established from Uganda to Tanzania. The Tanzania Standard Gauge Railway is indeed positioned to complement and strategically link with the Lobito Corridor, even though they originate in different parts of the continent. The strategic connection lies in creating a transcontinental logistics network for DRC: goods (especially critical minerals like copper and cobalt) can move more efficiently across Africa, either east to Indian Ocean markets or west to Atlantic routes. This reduces reliance on single export routes, improves resilience, and enhances intra-African trade under frameworks like the African Continental Free Trade Area.

These developments give life to new trade flows, like transporting fuel from Uganda to the Middle East, or moving copper from Congo to China.

In the SADC and EAC regions, comprising over half a billion people, the demand for goods and services, including fuel, is significant. Regional agreements must be fostered to harmonise customs, tariffs, regulations, and the movement of goods, people and services. Frameworks like the EAC Customs Union and AfCFTA have reduced tariffs, but the system is often plagued by border delays and inconsistent enforcement, which dilute the impact of trade.

If banks with trade finance capabilities, including institutions like Absa with a growing pan-African footprint, support infrastructure development, this will boost connectivity, lower transport costs, and improve trade opportunities. Currently, it’s cheaper to move goods from China to Dar es Salaam than to transport them from Dar es Salaam to Mwanza, a region within Tanzania.

Trade finance is most impactful in sectors with predictable cross-border demand on agriculture, energy, and FMCG. Structured trade finance and supply chain finance help large corporates extend terms to suppliers, indirectly supporting SME participation.

The East African economy is largely driven by SMEs. In Tanzania, 96% of our economy depends on SMEs, but they lack funding to support themselves. The majority are trade-based, with imports from the Middle East, China, India, and others, and exports like minerals or agri-commodities to other parts of the world. While banks can help support SMEs, the locals must also support them to benefit the local market.

Besides raising capital, risk perception and informality are constraints to their success. Better credit data with digital identities and scalable guarantee schemes backed by Development Finance Institutions (DFIs) help to mitigate risk. While simplified, digital trade finance products are now available, these are still limited. Anchor-led eco-systems with stronger linkage to large corporates is manifesting in the mining, FMCG, manufacturing and agricultural sectors.

DFIs as key stakeholders can work alongside financial institutions to help enhance trade routes. While it might be difficult for them to be on the ground, they can collaborate with the banks in certain markets within the continent to extend their reach.

To help digitisation, we must empower fintechs to enable much stronger platforms. In Tanzania, SME customers work together to collaborate on small platforms, to submit bulk orders to China. There’s strength in numbers.

Banks have capabilities to support trade flows and payment via digitisation in areas like Ethiopia and the DRC. While some markets like DRC are high-risk, our competitors are growing there. Last year, a regional bank made 30% of their profit in Congo, for example. We can find safe ways to play in those markets, selecting the sectors we can perform in.

Banks with a Pan-African presence, such as Absa, which operates across key trade corridors, must bring a true corridor strategy to build sector-specific solutions like agri-value chains across multiple countries; use digital platforms to serve mid-market clients, not just large corporates; partner with DFIs to expand risk appetite in frontier markets; and position themselves as a trade enabler, not just financiers, by integrating advisory, foreign exchange, and working capital solutions.

The real differentiator will be the ability to intermediate not just capital, but meaningful connectivity, helping to link clients across markets, currencies, and the supply chain.

Returning to Nairobi, Kenya on 12 and 13 May 2026, GTR East Africa brings together key stakeholders across trade, supply chain, commodity, infrastructure and export financing. As a Gold Sponsor of the event, Absa CIB reinforces its commitment to supporting trade and growth in the region.

By Daniel Munslow, Managing Executive: Group Communications, Absa Group

It was around the turn of the century that students in the fields of public relations and communications would have started encountering new curricula centred on what was then referred to as “new media” – an examination of the mainstreaming of the internet and the information platforms it enabled, and what all of this might mean for the more traditional practices the industry had become so attached to in the decades preceding.

Many would argue that the landscape has since undergone a profound and persistent rate of change, spurred forward largely by digital technologies and social media, which fundamentally altered who controls information and how it moves. Yet with the growing ubiquity of Artificial Intelligence, perhaps the most consequential development since those early debates around new media, attention is being drawn back to a much older question: trust.

To fully appreciate the correlation, it is worth considering the environment into which AI has arrived.

The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report for 2026 points to the emergence of a contested multipolar landscape in which confrontation is increasingly displacing collaboration, and trust is steadily losing value. The latest Edelman Trust Barometer paints a similar picture at a societal level, finding that seven in ten people globally exhibit what it describes as an insular mindset, characterised by an unwillingness or hesitation to trust those with different values, views, approaches to solving problems, or cultural backgrounds.

The role AI will ultimately play within this environment remains to be seen, but from a communications risk perspective, its implications are already becoming apparent in two areas: credibility and visibility.

For the first time, the cost and effort associated with producing content – whether written, visual, or audio – is falling dramatically, raising the prospect of a communications environment in which that content becomes almost limitless. That may be good news for productivity. It may even prove beneficial for creativity. But it also presents a challenge, because as content becomes easier to produce, communication may have to work harder to prove that it is worth believing.

The credibility question becomes particularly relevant when viewed against the growth of organised disinformation across the continent, with the Africa Center for Strategic Studies reporting that the 189 documented disinformation campaigns active in Africa today represent almost four times the number recorded in 2022, a figure it still regards as an undercount. The Centre notes that these campaigns have helped drive violence, validate military coups, silence civil society voices and obscure corruption, developments that many analysts have linked, at least in part, to the proliferation of AI, which has become a boon for content farms and misinformation networks.

This means that as audiences become more discerning and the volume of synthetic content continues to grow, organisations may find themselves having to work harder to establish the authenticity of their messages and the reliability of the information upon which they are based. It also means there is far more competition for attention, a reality that places emphasis on visibility, believability and an organisation’s ability to cut through.

Precisely how much content now being generated by AI is difficult to determine, although some early studies estimate that anywhere between 30% and 75% of the text appearing on active web pages may originate from AI-generated sources. Whether the true figure sits at the lower or upper end of that range is almost beside the point, what matters is that the proliferation of AI-generated content is already well underway and shows little sign of slowing.

Audiences may not always be able to determine whether a piece of content was produced by a person or a machine, but they are often remarkably adept at recognising authenticity, expertise, lived experience, and genuine accountability when they encounter it. These qualities may become some of the most important differentiators available to organisations in the years ahead. In a world where content is abundant, trust in the institution behind the content may matter more than ever.

There is a certain irony in all of this. Many of the tools contributing to the proliferation of content are also proving useful in helping organisations navigate it.

Communications and public relations teams are using AI to adapt campaigns across different markets and cultural contexts with greater speed and precision; during live events like product launches and major announcements, audience sentiment can be analysed in real time, allowing messaging to evolve as conversations unfold; some organisations are using AI to run thousands of simulated crisis scenarios based on their operating environment, helping identify potential vulnerabilities and prepare response strategies before issues materialise; others are applying it to media engagement, analysing journalists’ reporting histories and areas of interest to develop more relevant and personalised outreach.

The same technologies are also beginning to redefine how organisations communicate directly with customers. At Absa, for example, the Abby virtual assistant helps clients access information, navigate products and services, and complete a range of banking activities through a chatbot platform. It is a demonstration of how AI is increasingly being deployed across the full spectrum of stakeholder engagement.

Those that benefit most from AI may not be those that automate everything, but those that understand which parts of communication should remain human. There is, however, a catch. Governance.

Surveys show that 59% of public relations practitioners expect AI and automation to grow in importance over the next five years, but at the same time, Africa has been found to have the lowest rate of governance-backed AI adoption at 24.8%, while only 20.5% of organisations report having responsible AI guidelines or policies in place.

There is an urgent need to invest in AI literacy and responsible AI training, ensuring employees engage with these tools critically and understand both their capabilities and limitations. Equally important is the development of clear governance mechanisms that guide how AI is used in practice, promoting greater accountability and transparency as these technologies become more deeply embedded in everyday communications activities.

At Absa, for example, the introduction of a Responsible Use of AI Policy has sought to establish clearer principles around transparency, human oversight and accountability, while complementary standards governing machine learning and AI models help guide how these technologies are developed and applied across the organisation.

The objective is not to constrain innovation, but to ensure that its adoption takes place within a framework that recognises both the opportunities and responsibilities that accompany it.

In many respects, that brings the profession full circle. For all the technological change communications has experienced over the past two decades, trust is the constant. The responsibility now is to ensure that it remains so.

by Ben Holland, Absa Resources; Energy Banker: US Corridor and Russel Timbe, Absa Resources; Energy Banker

When New York-based energy firm Hydro-Link partnered last year with Swiss infrastructure group Mitrelli to develop a 1,150-kilometre transmission line between Angola and the Democratic Republic of Congo, the logic behind the investment was difficult to miss. Valued at roughly US$1.5 billion, the project is designed to move surplus hydropower from Angola into the energy-constrained copperbelt region of southeastern DRC, where electricity shortages continue to disrupt mining and processing operations tied to some of the world’s most strategically important critical minerals deposits.

What makes this particularly interesting is that it is one of the clearest of many examples pointing to a broader pattern emerging across parts of Africa’s energy sector, where investment, both local and foreign, is gravitating towards power infrastructure linked to large industrial demand centres capable of supporting long-term offtake, especially in mining, mineral processing, manufacturing, logistics corridors, technology, and the wider industrial activity developing around them.

None of this suggests investor appetite for renewable energy is waning; if anything, private capital flows into African clean energy projects have rebounded over the last few years, with the International Energy Agency (IEA) estimating investment rose from roughly US$17 billion in 2019 to almost US$40 billion in 2024.

What is changing, however, is where that capital is looking for certainty, regardless of the scale of the opportunity. Energy investors are more likely to enter new markets, but opportunities will be increasingly centred on robust commercial and industrial offtake, sensible regulatory and tariff regimes, and a diversified portfolio approach.

There is no doubt that international capital still wants exposure to the continent’s energy markets, but the investment logic appears much more commercially disciplined now, with greater attention being paid to the broader economic activity underlying that power demand over the long term.

Perhaps one of the more interesting longer-term questions surfacing around this logic in conversations with investors, especially those in the United States and China, is what happens as Africa’s data-centre market starts scaling more aggressively alongside the growth of AI and hyperscale computing infrastructure, both of which require enormous and highly reliable power supply. If digital infrastructure is going to grow meaningfully on the continent, then the energy required to sustain it inevitably becomes part of the investment case as well.

McKinsey estimates that African data-centre capacity demand could reach between 1.5 GW and 2.2 GW by 2030, potentially catalysing between US$10 billion and US$20 billion in investment across the continent, with the energy infrastructure required to support that growth likely to attract billions more in associated capital. Many operators are already trying to solve for this themselves, even if not yet at the scale likely to be required over time. Mining companies, manufacturers, and increasingly data-centre operators are investing directly in dedicated energy supply as reliable electricity becomes a competitive necessity. In South Africa, for example, data-centre operator Teraco has begun construction of a 120 MW solar PV project in the Free State while also securing additional renewable wind energy supply through long-term power purchase agreements for its operations.

But there is much ground to cover.

Recently, Kenyan President William Ruto revealed that a proposed US$1 billion hyperscale data-centre project involving Microsoft and UAE-based G42 had encountered a major constraint around power availability. The first phase alone required roughly 100 MW, with plans to scale towards 1 GW over time, an enormous requirement in a country whose effective grid capacity at the time stood at roughly 2.4 GW. As Ruto himself put it, powering a single hyperscale facility at that scale would effectively require ‘shutting down the whole country.’
That is part of what is drawing attention towards countries with larger and more diversified energy mixes capable of supporting demand at that scale over the long term. Markets such as Angola and Mozambique, with significant hydro and gas resources alongside wider energy export potential, are increasingly entering those conversations for that reason. It is also drawing attention towards economic corridors such as the Lobito Corridor, where investment exposure can be spread across multiple jurisdictions, sectors, and energy systems rather than concentrated around a single market or asset.

This is changing the way investors think about risk.

Concentrating exposure around a single asset or one operating environment leaves very little room when conditions change, and investors are instead looking at how exposure can be spread across different markets, different energy mixes, and different types of demand in ways that create a more resilient long-term investment proposition. And it is in these differences that navigating the breadth of opportunities across 54 countries becomes profoundly difficult, with investors entering from outside often realising too late that many of the assumptions and templates that worked in Europe, Asia, or the United States do not always translate neatly on the continent. That is making domestic partnerships far more important today. Whether through banks or other institutions already embedded within local environments, investors now need partners capable of helping them traverse the conditions surrounding projects at a country or regional level before capital is committed at scale.

Africa’s long-term energy opportunity is less likely to depend on isolated generation assets than on the ability to connect reliable power to concentrated industrial demand.

A megawatt connected to weak demand is a very different proposition to one connected to energy-intensive economic activity whose own competitiveness depends on stable electricity supply. That is where much of the first-mover advantage may be for international investors and financiers able to identify those linkages early enough.

by Cheryl Buss, Chief Executive, Absa International

A view that surfaced repeatedly during the Africa Debate in London this month was that Africa may be undergoing a shift in its trade and investment paradigm. It is the sort of phrase that often attracts healthy scepticism, partly because every period of disruption tends to produce predictions of a new era with a new set of rules. But what made this particular proposition difficult to dismiss was the extent to which it appeared across conversations that were otherwise very different in nature.

During a panel I had the privilege of moderating, bringing together voices from trade policy, development finance, regional economic governance, and international investment, the discussion kept returning to a similar observation: that some of the macroeconomic and geopolitical headwinds creating uncertainty across the global economy may also be fundamentally changing the way investors think about Africa’s place within it. And perhaps more importantly, how Africa thinks of itself.

The question, of course, is whether this really amounts to a paradigm shift at all.

One could argue that the continent’s trade and investment landscape has been evolving for decades, but for much of that time economic development was largely pursued through national self-determination, advancing in a piecemeal fashion from one market to the next. Fragmentation has consequences. Capital tends to pool in familiar destinations, reinforcing established investment corridors while leaving opportunities elsewhere competing for attention. It can also limit resilience when external shocks occur, a reality once again brought into focus by recent tensions in the Middle East and the disruption of one of the world’s most strategically important trade routes, alongside the volatility created by new tariff regimes in the United States and shifting trade policies across some of the world’s largest economies.

But those same pressures are also creating opportunities for Africa to reposition itself. Growing competition for the critical minerals underpinning the energy transition has increased the continent’s strategic importance within global trade and industrial supply chains, giving it greater influence over how future economic relationships are structured.

Determining whether a new paradigm is emerging now therefore requires looking at the issue through two distinct lenses: principle and practice. Practice is perhaps the easier of the two, because it is ultimately reflected in market behaviour. If a new paradigm is emerging, it should be evident in where capital is flowing, who is deploying it, and what opportunities are attracting attention. On all three fronts, there are indications that something is changing.

Consider the United States. U.S.-Africa trade reached almost $105 billion in 2024, yet much of the current conversation is dominated by uncertainty surrounding the future of AGOA, the programme that has underpinned much of the relationship for the past quarter century. Its temporary lapse in 2025, subsequent short-term reinstatement, and ongoing debate around what comes next arguably say as much about how Africa’s position has changed as it does about America’s. The era in which access to a single major market could define the continent’s trade and investment proposition is steadily giving way to one in which African policymakers and business leaders are managing a growing portfolio of commercial partnerships spanning China, Europe, the Gulf states and an expanding group of middle powers, each competing for influence and access.

This is not to say that appetite from the U.S. private sector has been lost, nor that Africa’s interest in the relationship has diminished. There is still strong interest from many of our own clients at Absa looking to trade and invest across the continent, but what has changed, at least in part, is a perception of heightened risk and a growing demand for guidance on how best to navigate it.

China, meanwhile, has capitalised on these challenges, with Beijing’s recent decision to extend zero-tariff access to a wide range of African exports expected to strengthen its position as the continent’s largest single-country trading partner following record bilateral trade of $275 billion in 2024. Yet here too, the relationship is changing. From Absa’s engagements with clients and policymakers globally and across Africa, it is clear the continent is seeking to leverage the aforementioned disruption by establishing trade and investment engagement on stronger terms. The ask is for greater participation in industrial value creation, and while the energy transition is creating new areas of commercial interest that extend beyond traditional infrastructure and extractives, engineering, procurement and construction (EPC) arrangements are becoming a more prominent feature of the relationship, sitting alongside trade and technology exports in ways that would have looked quite different a decade ago.

Competition from China has also arguably forced a more deliberate European response, with initiatives such as Global Gateway recognising Africa’s trade and investment potential in the context of a more regionalised global market. But while the EU has moved to position itself as a long-term investment partner, progress on the trade side of the relationship has been less pronounced, with trade from several major European economies stagnating over the last decade, in part because the policy architecture has not always kept pace with the ambition of the relationship. Without deeper bilateral arrangements with key African economies, Europe risks having the language of partnership without the commercial machinery to match it.

On the other hand, the Gulf states have become one to watch. Over a relatively short period of time, the United Arab Emirates, for example, has established itself as one of the continent’s most active economic partners, recently becoming the largest backer of new business projects in Africa. What makes this particularly noteworthy is not only the scale of capital being deployed, but the speed at which new trade relationships are being formed. The UAE now ranks among the most important export destinations for several African economies, including Zimbabwe and Uganda, illustrating how quickly the geography of Africa’s external economic relationships can change.

Much of the UAE’s engagement with Africa has been driven through state-backed investment and public-private partnerships, although private-sector participation has also grown considerably in recent years, leaving significant scope for broader engagement across a wider range of sectors and markets. What we have noted from our engagements with clients is that one area attracting particular attention is the UAE’s large family business sector. These enterprises have long played a central role in the Emirati economy, and there are signs that many are beginning to look beyond traditional markets as they explore opportunities across a wider range of African countries.

These are indications that a new paradigm may be emerging. Trade and investment activity is becoming more diverse, both in terms of who is participating and where interest is being directed. But whether this can evolve into something more meaningful depends on whether the principles needed to support it are also falling into place.

Perhaps the clearest example of this is the African Continental Free Trade Area. As of 2025, 49 countries had deposited their instruments of ratification, more than 40 had submitted tariff offers, service liberalisation had begun across five priority sectors, and thousands of AfCFTA certificates of origin had already been issued. Intra-African trade grew by 12.4% in 2024 to more than $220 billion, a development many see as evidence that the agreement is beginning to gain traction.

The detail, and ultimately the success, however, is in the execution. Africa still accounts for only around 3% of global trade, while intra-African trade represents just 14.4% of the continent’s formal trade. Those figures speak to the scale of the task ahead and the need to move beyond policy ambition towards the effective implementation of the mechanisms required to support trade both within Africa and beyond it. For example, if there is one lesson that has emerged repeatedly from conversations across the trade and investment community, it is that there needs to be a deliberate focus on both hard infrastructure and addressing the factors that contribute to the continent’s risk premium.

For all their differences, many of the reforms taking place across the continent are underpinned by a similar idea: that Africa is likely to carry more economic weight together than it does in parts. The pace at which integration efforts have advanced over the last decade suggests that this is no longer an aspiration, but an important organising principle for how the continent engages the global economy.

As for the question that sat at the centre of so many discussions at the Africa Debate, the answer is that Africa is indeed entering a new trade and investment paradigm, albeit one that is still in transition. The activity is there and the institutional foundations are beginning to take shape. If the trajectory holds, it may prove to be one of the most consequential economic shifts in the continent’s modern history.

Lane Mogashoa, Business Development Support -Enterprise Development, Absa Business Banking

When Chantelle de Bruyn’s grandfather had to give up coffee for health reasons, she wondered whether she could create something that would still give him the experience of having a cup. She found a peculiar answer in butternut, although turning that idea into a product people would actually drink took far more than inspiration.

The Free State entrepreneur registered Buttercup Farmhouse in 2019, completed short online courses in biochemistry and approached the University of the Free State’s Food Science Lab for help. Over the next three years, the product was tested and refined until it was ready for market and, by 2024, the coffee alternative that had started with one person’s health challenge had found its way onto the shelves of major retailers.

De Bruyn credits part of that progress to the funding and mentorship she received along the way, which helped her scale the business, enter new markets and build a stronger understanding of financial management. Through Absa, she received a business development grant and access to a lending facility, along with opportunities to showcase her products at Lemo Fest and on the Proudly South African platform. This exposure helped her reach wider markets, supported by marketing assistance and broader business development support.

Her experience points to something that is missed in the conversation about SME development more broadly. Capital matters, but every growing business also depends on the capability to use it well and a clear route into the market. For women entrepreneurs, access to that wider business ecosystem is often less equal, which means funding alone may leave many of the barriers to growth untouched.

According to the Small Business Growth Index, South Africa’s first real-time barometer of the conditions shaping small business performance, only 38% of businesses surveyed in 2025 believed they could survive for more than a year under sustained cost pressure without external support. There is clearly a funding gap, because small businesses account for much of the country’s entrepreneurial activity and need capital if they are to grow into larger, more productive enterprises. But funding is still treated as the end point, when in reality it is only one half of the problem, especially for women-owned businesses trying to move from survival into sustained growth.

The way we think about SME development for women-owned enterprises needs to become more holistic.

A business can receive funding and still struggle because the owner does not yet have the systems or commercial relationships needed to use that capital well. We see versions of this with clients all the time at Absa. An entrepreneur may have a strong product and a growing customer base, but the business records are still mixed with personal finances, invoices are not followed up consistently, and the owner does not have a clear view of what the business earns after costs. A lender looking at that business sees uncertainty, even where the underlying enterprise has real potential.

Research in South Africa has also found that women entrepreneurs face weaker market linkages and are concentrated in sectors where businesses tend to be smaller, which affects the type of finance they can access and the pace at which they can grow. Programmes that combine finance with ongoing mentorship and a real route into the market have been shown to achieve better results than support offered in isolation, which is why South Africa needs more initiatives that stay with the entrepreneur as the business develops. The strongest programmes work alongside the business long enough to help the owner understand what is holding it back, fix that problem and then move with greater confidence into the next stage of growth.

Market access is particularly important because a business cannot train its way around the absence of customers. This is where large companies and public institutions can make a direct difference by giving women-owned SMEs a realistic route into their supply chains and then helping them understand what is required to remain there.

One such example is an Enterprise Development Programme developed through a partnership between Absa and SME incubator MyDough. It is designed to support 100 South African entrepreneurs, especially women, through business development support, mentorship and coaching, creating market access opportunities and providing support towards funding readiness and access to funding.

Initiatives like these do not reduce the urgency of closing the funding gap, but they do change what successful funding should look like. The aim is to help more women-owned businesses reach the point where they can take on capital and turn it into sustained growth. That will require finance and business development to be treated as part of the same journey, because that is how the entrepreneur experiences them.