It’s a weekday morning in Lagos. Under the burnt orange haze of exhaust fumes and rising sun, traders pour into Balogun Market, plastic-wrapped wares balanced on heads, goods tucked under arms, ready for another day of commerce that will never appear in a national ledger. It’s a choreography of survival and strategy, where business moves faster than bureaucracy and trust is worth more than a tax ID. Yet, across boardrooms in Accra and Addis-Ababa, continental leaders speak of a single African market, the AfCFTA, as the catalyst that will revolutionize trade, industrialise economies, and finally deliver Africa’s long-awaited economic renaissance.
However, there’s a disconnect: that future is being negotiated in air-conditioned halls and offices, completely detached from the very present reality that surges and survives, raw and unregulated, on every bustling city market street and dusty village corner.
The Informal Elephant in the AfCFTA Room
Africa’s informal economy is not a margin; it is the center. According to the African Development Bank, the informal sector accounts for over 85% of employment and as much as 55% of GDP in sub-Saharan Africa. In Nigeria, over 90% of workers operate informally. It is not an aberration, it is the system.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), launched in 2021 with promises of boosting intra-African trade by 52%, was designed for the formal economy. It presumes documentation, digital infrastructure, harmonized standards, and compliance capacity that simply don’t exist for most African businesses. Its architects imagine trade as clean lines crossing borders on trucks, but in much of Africa, trade is a blur; woven baskets on heads, goods exchanged by hand, not invoice, across porous frontiers.
This disconnect is not merely logistical, it is philosophical.
The Psychological and Colonial Hangover of Formalization
To formalize, for many Africans, is to invite scrutiny. The colonial legacy of trade policing, extortion, and coercion has conditioned a generational wariness of officialdom. In many markets, registration is not seen as opportunity, but as exposure. What benefits are promised seem vague; what penalties are threatened feel real.
Meanwhile, the formal frameworks echo foreign models: tariff schedules, customs protocols, and digital compliance systems borrowed from European and Asian systems. Although, as economist Grieve Chelwa argues, “Africa doesn’t suffer from a lack of economic activity. It suffers from a lack of economic power.” Not just the power to trade, but to define its own economic destiny; designing systems that reflect its lived realities, including the vast informal sector, and to exercise true leverage in global markets, rather than adapting to rules written elsewhere.
When AfCFTA Hits the Dusty Road
Example 1: Rules of Origin, Rules of Exclusion
AfCFTA offers tariff-free trade, but only if goods meet complex “rules of origin” requirements. That means tracing supply chains, proving value addition, and documenting it all. But what happens when you’re a leather shoemaker in Kano, buying hides from local herders, crafting by hand, and selling across the Niger border on a motorcycle? There’s no invoice, no customs stamp. just a history of hands shaken and goods delivered. His supply chain is oral, his quality control is personal. In a system where reputation is currency, his goods remain invisible to the agreement designed to unlock their potential.
Which means that for millions like him, AfCFTA’s promised gains remain locked behind a bureaucracy they were never meant to navigate.
Example 2: Borders, Bribes, and the Unofficial Economy
While the AfCFTA promises to eliminate non-tariff barriers, informal traders still face real, corrupt ones. In 2023, the Southern Africa Cross Border Traders Association reported that informal traders spend up to 25% of their total profits on bribes and “unofficial fees” at border crossings.
To quote a Ghanaian trader from a UNECA report: “We don’t need new agreements. We need old ones to work.”
Banking Without Banks, Trading Without Trust
The AfCFTA relies on tools that informal traders often don’t use: banks, trade credit, and documented logistics chains. The thing is, traders rely on mobile money, savings groups, and face-to-face trust networks. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) may be a technical breakthrough, but until it speaks the language of the market, it plugs into mobile wallets, savings circles, and the face-to-face credit systems that actually move money across Africa. It remains a marvel built for a formality most traders can’t engage.
Meanwhile, access to finance is a dream deferred.In sub-Saharan Africa, only between 20% and 33% of small businesses have access to bank loans or line of credit, according to the Center for Strategic and International Studies.This entrenches inequality within AfCFTA implementation: big companies benefit, the rest watch.
What the Informal Economy Can Teach the Formal One
The irony is almost too neat: the informal economy, often dismissed as chaotic or inefficient, functions with a kind of logic that the formal economy rarely matches. It is not some primitive placeholder awaiting state intervention—it is a decentralized system of survival that, in many cases, works. In East Africa, boda bodas move parcels across urban sprawls with a speed licensed couriers can’t promise. In Cameroon and the DRC, perishable goods travel from farm to table without refrigeration, through handoffs choreographed not by algorithms but by trust, habit, and hustle. These systems are not failed versions of something better. They are functioning economies built in the cracks of the state.
The AfCFTA imagines trade as protocol: registered trucks, scanned barcodes, harmonized paperwork. But what if it began with what already works? What if it treated the continent’s informal networks not as a problem to formalize, but as a foundation to build on? There is a kind of intelligence in the street—improvisational, adaptive, efficient on its own terms. The real task may not be to replace it, but to learn from it. Formal trade has much to gain from the quiet competence of the informal. But to see that, you first have to look.
Pathways to Integration, Not Erasure
If the AfCFTA is to matter beyond the stages of statehouses and the footnotes of policy briefs, it must move from exclusion to integration, not in theory, but in texture. The texture of real markets, real traders, real money moving hand to hand. The informal economy doesn’t need to be formalized in the image of European customs systems. It needs to be recognised as Africa’s native trade infrastructure, as legitimate in its chaos as it is in its coherence.
We already see clues of how this might work. In Kenya, apps like Tala are translating trust into credit scores, measuring financial behaviour through mobile activity rather than bank statements. In Nigeria, Paystack has done more for digital merchant onboarding than years of policy speeches on formalisation. These are not solutions imported from Geneva, they are African solutions, responding to African behaviours.
Rwanda’s Irembo platform makes business registration a matter of minutes, not months. Imagine that efficiency scaled across 50 economies. Imagine a tax ID that doesn’t scare traders but empowers them, because it opens access to mobile loans, digital marketplaces, and logistics services. Formality, if it is to mean anything to the informal trader, must offer immediate reward, not future surveillance.
Perhaps the most radical is this: the AfCFTA must learn to speak the languages of the street. Not only metaphorically, but literally. Swahili in Kisumu, Hausa in Kano, Zulu in KwaMashu. Trade literacy should not arrive in laminated English PDFs but in market stalls, on radio, through local unions and WhatsApp groups. The AfCFTA needs to think less like a customs union, and more like a community network alive, adaptive, and multilingual.
What if the point was not to replace informal networks but to recognise them as the continent’s original trade corridors? What if the AfCFTA didn’t just chart a new route but lit up the ones already in motion, over dusty roads, across shared dialects, inside the muscle memory of millions? That pivot from policy’s polished parchment, to the messy pulsing bloodstream of real trade, is where the AfCFTA stops being a vision and starts becoming a vehicle.
Conclusion: The Future is Hybrid, Not Binary
Africa’s path to prosperity won’t be laid by policy alone, no matter how well-drafted. It will depend on empathy, pragmatism, and an honest reckoning with how trade already moves, outside spreadsheets, across borders, and through trust.
The AfCFTA is visionary, but it will falter if it merely imports systems that dismiss the continent’s lived economic logic. It must root itself in what already works: Africa’s informal genius, its decentralised hustle, its history of surviving, often thriving in the margins.
The future isn’t formal versus informal. It’s a dialogue between them. A market that listens before it regulates, learns before it legislates. If we’re serious about building a unified African market, we must get off the freeway and first learn to walk its footpaths.
Eyesan Toritseju is a Lagos-based strategist and cultural commentator. In his writing, especially through his column, Cosmopolitan Nigeria, he examines how African societies confront the legacies of their past while reimagining identity, influence, and progress in the present.
