The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat has launched one of the most ambitious trade-modernisation projects ever attempted in the global South: the Africa Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade (ADAPT) initiative.
Developed in partnership with the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBI), the IOTA Foundation and the World Economic Forum (WEF), ADAPT aims to replace the continent’s fragmented, paper-based trade systems with a shared, open-source digital backbone connecting identity, data and payments across all AfCFTA member states.
Unveiled in Johannesburg in November 2025, the platform is designed to make African trade faster, cheaper and more transparent, and to become a core enabler of AfCFTA’s wider objective: turning Africa’s 1.5 billion people and more than US$3 trillion in GDP into a genuinely integrated single market.
Today, intra-African trade is still dominated by manual processes. For a single shipment, traders may deal with up to 30 entities and as many as 240 paper documents, while border officials log into multiple non-interoperable systems to verify basic data. Transaction fees on cross-border payments can reach 6–9%, draining an estimated US$25 billion a year from African economies.
ADAPT is designed as a public digital infrastructure that tackles these frictions on three layers:
- Identity layer
- Secure, self-sovereign digital identities for companies and authorised officials.
- Integration with national ID and e-government systems (e.g. Kenya’s eCitizen, Nigeria’s NIMC).
- Data layer
- A common, verifiable data environment where trade documents – invoices, certificates of origin, phytosanitary documents, customs declarations – are issued and shared in digital form.
- Distributed ledger technology (DLT) ensures that documents are tamper-evident and auditable, while AI automates compliance checks and risk scoring.
- Finance layer
- Stablecoin-based and tokenized payment rails to enable instant settlement in cross-border trade.
- The use of USDT (Tether) and other compliant stablecoins is envisaged to reduce payment delays and lower transaction costs, while tokenization of goods and receivables opens new routes to trade finance, particularly for SMEs.
By connecting these three layers, ADAPT seeks to transform Africa’s logistics backbone from a patchwork of disconnected systems into a single, interoperable digital fabric for goods, data and money.
The governance model is explicitly multilateral and public-interest oriented:
- The AfCFTA Secretariat leads the initiative and anchors it within the broader AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol, which sets rules for data governance, digital trade facilitation and emerging technologies across member states.
- The IOTA Foundation provides the underlying distributed ledger infrastructure and technical expertise, building on earlier trade-digitisation projects such as the Trade Logistics Information Pipeline (TLIP) in Kenya and the Trade Worldwide Information Network (TWIN).
- The Tony Blair Institute supplies policy and implementation support through teams in more than 17 African countries, helping align ADAPT with national reforms in customs, ports and financial regulation.
- The World Economic Forum acts as a convening partner, linking the project to global best practice on digital trade rules and public-private collaboration.
AfCFTA Secretary-General Wamkele Mene has publicly framed ADAPT as “Africa’s blueprint for the digitisation and modernisation of trade – a system that replaces fragmentation with integration, friction with trust, and inefficiency with scale,” underlining that the goal is not a niche technology experiment but a core pillar of the AfCFTA architecture.
The backbone of ADAPT is not being launched from a standing start. Earlier pilots in Kenya and Rwanda, built on the same technical principles, have already demonstrated quantifiable gains:
- Border officials in Kenya previously had to consult 13 different systems to retrieve trade data; the new integrated interface consolidates this into a single view.
- 60–70% of manual verification tasks have been eliminated in pilot corridors.
- Document retrieval times that once stretched to six or seven hours have fallen to around 30 minutes.
- Exporters report savings of roughly US$400 per month per consignment in printing, courier and document management costs.
- Freight forwarders have cut overheads thanks to 50–60% fewer data re-entries.
These results – verified by AfCFTA partner communications and independent business press coverage – provide the empirical basis for the ADAPT business case and are now being used to persuade additional countries to sign on.
If fully implemented, the projected macro-level gains from ADAPT are substantial. Official modelling by AfCFTA partners suggests that the platform could:
- Double intra-African trade by 2035, from around 17% of Africa’s total trade today to levels closer to Asian and European benchmarks.
- Generate approximately US$23.6 billion in annual efficiency gains through lower logistics, documentation and financing costs.
- Unlock more than US$70 billion in additional trade value each year as new corridors, products and SMEs are integrated into cross-border value chains.
- Cut border clearance times by more than 50%, with a target of reducing some clearance cycles from up to 14 days to fewer than three days.
- Reduce cross-border payment fees to below 3% on average, compared with current ranges of 6–9%.
For African businesses, particularly small and mid-sized exporters, these numbers translate into shorter cash cycles, lower working-capital pressures and expanded market access. For governments, they imply a broader tax base, more predictable customs revenue and a clearer digital trail to combat fraud and under-invoicing.
One of the most closely watched aspects of ADAPT is its embrace of stablecoins and tokenization as trade-finance tools.
According to public statements by IOTA and reporting by global financial media, ADAPT will initially support USDT-denominated stablecoin payments across approved corridors, subject to national regulation. The combination of verifiable, on-ledger trade data and programmable stablecoins is expected to:
- Enable instant or near-instant settlement between importers and exporters.
- Lower reliance on correspondent banking channels that are often costly and slow in Africa.
- Unlock new forms of on-chain trade finance, where commodities, inventory or receivables can be tokenized and used as collateral.
From a policy perspective, this places ADAPT squarely at the intersection of AfCFTA’s trade agenda and Africa’s evolving fintech regulation, offering a real-world test case for how stablecoins can be integrated into formal cross-border payment systems rather than remaining in the grey zone of purely speculative crypto trading.
The current roadmap foresees a phased roll-out:
- Phase I (2025–2026): Operationalisation in early adopter countries, including Kenya and Ghana, with a third pilot underway and preparations for wider East and West African integration.
- Phase II (from 2026): Gradual expansion to all AfCFTA and African Union member states, aligned with the entry into force and implementation of the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol.
- By 2035: Target to connect all 55 AfCFTA member states into a single digital trade infrastructure, supporting the broader goal of full AfCFTA implementation.
For national administrations, joining ADAPT is not simply a technical plug-in; it requires alignment of customs procedures, data-protection laws, KYC/AML rules and capital-flow regulations with the standards emerging under AfCFTA’s digital framework.
For African policymakers, ADAPT presents a strategic opportunity and a complex implementation challenge.
Opportunities
- Structural competitiveness: By cutting delays and costs, the platform can improve Africa’s position in global value chains, particularly in time-sensitive sectors such as agribusiness, light manufacturing and critical minerals.
- SME inclusion: Digital identities and verifiable transaction histories give smaller firms the documentation they need to access credit and cross-border finance.
- Transparency and governance: With end-to-end digital audit trails, the scope for document fraud, mis-declaration and “informal” border payments is reduced.
Risks and constraints
- Digital and infrastructure gaps: Uneven connectivity, power supply and institutional capacity could slow adoption, risking a two-speed Africa where some economies plug into ADAPT quickly while others lag.
- Regulatory coordination: Stablecoin use, data localisation rules and cybersecurity frameworks must be carefully harmonised to avoid regulatory fragmentation simply being replicated in digital form.
- Trust and sovereignty concerns: Governments will need assurance that shared digital infrastructure does not dilute national control over sensitive trade and financial data, even as they commit to AfCFTA-wide rules.
How these trade-offs are managed will determine whether ADAPT becomes a continental utility or remains a set of promising pilots.
For major African trading hubs – including Egypt, South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria, Morocco and Ghana – ADAPT offers a chance to consolidate their role as logistics and financial gateways into the wider AfCFTA market.
Countries that move early on:
- integrating customs and port systems with ADAPT,
- aligning financial-regulatory frameworks with cross-border stablecoin usage, and
- investing in digital identity and SME onboarding
are likely to capture a disproportionate share of the new trade corridors and investment flows that the platform enables.
For North African economies with strong ties to Europe, the Gulf and Asia, the initiative could also help position them as bridges between global supply chains and an increasingly digitised African internal market.
ADAPT is still in its early operational phase, but it already embodies several structural shifts:
- A move from project-based digital pilots to platform-level digital public infrastructure.
- A recognition that trade, data and finance are now inseparable in modern integration agendas.
- A deliberate attempt to leverage emerging technologies – DLT, AI, tokenization – within a rules-based, treaty-anchored AfCFTA framework, rather than allowing them to develop at the margins.
If ADAPT delivers on even a portion of its quantified ambitions – US$23.6 billion in annual efficiencies and over US$70 billion in additional trade value – it will stand as one of the most consequential economic reforms in Africa’s recent history, redefining how the continent trades with itself and with the world.
For now, the message from Johannesburg is clear: Africa intends not just to participate in the digital trade revolution, but to help set its standards.
