Last week, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the World Bank published a series of Digital Trade Reports reviewing the progress in key areas of digital trade of six Sub-Saharan African economies: Kenya, Nigeria, Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire, Benin, and Rwanda.

The reports, resulting from the WTO-World Bank pilot project “Digital Trade for Africa” launched in 2024, show significant improvements in the environment for digital trade in all countries that volunteered to be surveyed. These six countries span the breadth of the continent and a range of development levels. 

While important gaps remain, especially in the regulation and implementation of paperless trade, the foundations of digital trade – like electricity and internet access – are improving rapidly, finds the report. This progress is compounded by a range of growing legislation, which is increasingly closing the digital trade gap between Africa and many developed economies. 

The reports also formulate a range of policy actions and goals for the future; similar projects in Latin America and the Caribbean were launched last month, while a next round of assessments is expected to review even more African economies. 

Digital trade in Africa is growing faster than anywhere else in the world, expanding by 13% last year. However, this is also because the continent is so far behind the rest of the world on digital trade: in 2023, at the same time as the UK was completing its first cross-border DLT trade documents transaction, less than two in five people in sub-Saharan Africa had access to the internet. 

While electricity and internet adoption rates are growing steadily in the whole continent, the region is still responsible for less than 1% of global digital trade. This is partially due to the regulatory environment, finds the report: for example, all the countries surveyed had minimal or inadequate legislation on online consumer protection, and only Kenya had an adequate implementation of its single trade window mechanism. 

Only Rwanda, Nigeria, and Benin were close to implementing the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA), a crucial trade policy that simplifies cross-border e-commerce. 

Source: World Bank, TFG. World Bank’s Digital Trade Policy Gap Analyses, 1 = no regulation or heavy regulatory restrictions, 5 = comprehensive and modern regulatory framework.

Across the board, regulation was found to be a key driver – or inhibitor – of digital trade. On the one hand, a lack of regulatory recognition for some key aspects of paperless trade – such as Nigeria’s lack of legal enforceability of electronic contracts or the widespread regulatory scepticism around electronic invoicing – makes it difficult to implement innovation. On the opposite end of the spectrum, excessive regulatory burdens, especially around cross-border data transfers, limit access to many non-domestic digital services. 

However, regulators in all countries and across almost all policy areas have been active in pursuing good regulatory practices. What is needed now, especially as the digital trade landscape is evolving quickly, is a robust and comprehensive framework to fast-track digital trade adoption, finds the report. Simultaneously, services trade conditions need to be guaranteed more broadly in digital trade, enabling sectors such as telecommunications and banking. 

Overall, the countries surveyed – while all at slightly different stages of digital trade implementation – are on an upward trajectory, with increasingly improving regulation and high practical openness to digital trade. The foundations of digital trade are affordable, reliable internet connections and universal access to electricity; as this infrastructure grows more solid, so will digital trade, positioning the continent for a digital future.