Wamkele Mene, secretary general of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), says the Alamein Africa Forum in Egypt is producing agreements as well as debate. In an interview with Al-Ahram Hebdo, he pointed to several deals signed on the first day and said he wants the forum to deliver a roadmap for industrial development, priority sectors and jobs in the digital economy.
One of those deals was signed with the African Association of Automotive Manufacturers on the morning of the interview. It aims to draw investment into component manufacturing and the wider industrial development of the car sector, and Mene described the approach as “strictly commercial”. He stressed that bankable projects must be ready to take to market. All the protocols that make up the AfCFTA’s legal foundation have now been concluded, he said, and intra-African trade passed $220 billion in 2024.
Mene was clear about the limits of his own institution. The AfCFTA Secretariat holds no balance sheet and does not invest directly, while the African Development Bank puts Africa’s infrastructure deficit at between $150 billion and $170 billion. Closing that gap, he said, depends on cooperation between capital providers such as the African Development Bank, Africa50 and the Africa Finance Corporation, other development finance bodies and commercial banks. On critical minerals, he noted that the Protocol on Trade in Goods already requires local processing to add value on the continent, so the next step is targeted investment in productive capacity.
He also set out the trade area’s work beyond goods. Projections put African e-commerce at $712 billion by 2035, which he called encouraging, though he said more spending on digital infrastructure is needed, citing a Nigerian company that plans to invest nearly $1 billion over ten years. He described the Protocol on Women and Youth in Trade as “the first of its kind in the world”, backed by dedicated youth and women-in-trade platforms, while the Biashara Africa programme offers deal rooms, masterclasses and training to help small firms export.
Egypt, Mene said, is well placed to anchor continental value chains, with more than 160 pharmaceutical companies and output of more than 300,000 vehicles a year. He also turned to food security. Africa is a net food importer despite holding over 60 per cent of the world’s remaining uncultivated arable land, and he named maize, rice and soybeans as crops it could grow at scale. The main obstacle, in his view, is trade rules that restrict agricultural trade between African countries, and removing them would unlock that potential.
