View / How West Africa’s medieval Gold Road shows a path for free trade

This week I moderated a conversation about the three great West African empires of the medieval period between 1100-1500 AD: Ghana, Mali, and Songhai, and the trans-Saharan trade routes through which gold moved before ultimately heading to southern Europe and the Middle East.

Those trade routes have been called the Gold Road. But while gold was the highest-value good that attracted much of the attention, particularly from outside Africa, the routes also carried other items that were valued at the time, including glass beads, ceramics, and copper alloys. That intra-African commerce, University of Pennsylvania historian Sarah Guérin explained in our conversation, laid the foundation of some of the earliest global trade routes in history.

Some 500 years later — in between which came the turpitude and disruption of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism — African countries are seeking to once again prioritize building trade between themselves, seeing it as essential to boosting their collective role in the global economy. Hope is placed in the African Continental Free Trade Area, which was ratified in 2021. While far from being fully implemented, AfCFTA is credited with helping drive 3.2% growth in intra-African trade in 2023.

There are big bets being placed on the AfCFTA’s impact: The UN forecasts a 35% increase in intra-African trade by 2045, while the World Bank expects it will lift at least 50 million Africans out of extreme poverty by 2035.

There’s much work to be done, note authors for the Brookings Institution’s annual Foresight Africa report. They wrote that AfCFTA has established its legal and institutional groundwork, “but implementation remains thin, fragmented, and overly focused on tariffs.” For the trade pact to deliver on its promise of jobs, resilience, and structural change, policy makers need to focus on functionality and implementation.

But the intra-African trade figures reached in 2023 and 2024, are still under 15% of total African trade. Meanwhile, trade between Asian countries accounts for nearly 60% of Asia’s total.

AfCFTA Secretary-General Wamkele Mene has repeatedly called for African countries to lower barriers, particularly by investing in cross-border infrastructure to ease the movement of goods: “Achieving deeper integration demands strong political commitment from all member states,” he has written.