Why Africa’s next growth story depends on building more at home

On a weekday morning in Abeokuta, trucks queue outside a food-processing plant, their trailers heavy with cassava roots harvested only hours earlier. Nearby, workers in hairnets and rubber boots feed the roots into machines that wash, grind and dry them into high-quality flour. By evening, the flour will be packaged for bakeries in Lagos and, increasingly, for buyers beyond Nigeria’s borders.

A few decades ago, much of this cassava would have been sold fresh in local markets, vulnerable to spoilage within days. Today, it is part of something larger: a slow but consequential shift from exporting raw commodities to building industries around them.

That shift sits at the centre of one of the most important economic questions facing Africa.

Will the continent continue to ship out cocoa beans, lithium ore, pineapples and cotton – and import back chocolate, batteries, canned fruit and garments? Or will it build the factories, logistics systems and market institutions that allow it to keep more of the value it already produces?

A recent report by Boston Consulting Group, Strengthening the Africa-Europe Corridor, offers a striking estimate. Trade between Africa and Europe, which stood at roughly $545 billion in 2024, could approach $1 trillion over the next decade if both regions develop more integrated value chains. The report’s central thesis is straightforward: Africa and Europe are “objective allies” in a multipolar world, each possessing assets the other increasingly needs.

The implication for Africa is even more consequential. The greatest opportunity is not simply to trade more. It is to produce more sophisticated goods before those goods cross a border.

Africa enters this moment with formidable structural advantages

The continent has the world’s youngest population, abundant agricultural land and a large share of global reserves of strategic minerals essential to the energy transition. Europe, by contrast, offers deep capital markets, advanced industrial capabilities and a single market of more than 440 million consumers.

For years, these complementarities existed largely as theory. Now they are becoming strategic necessities.

Global supply chains are being redrawn. European manufacturers are seeking more resilient and geographically diversified sources of food ingredients, battery materials, textiles and digital services. Africa, with improving policy frameworks and the gradual implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area, (AfCTA) is better positioned than at any time in recent decades to respond.

But geography and demographics do not automatically create prosperity. Markets do.

Markets create prosperity

This is the deeper lesson of the BCG report and the central insight behind BusinessDay’s Go Local editorial thesis: development occurs when countries organise markets so that local production is processed, distributed and sold in forms that command higher value.

Africa has often produced abundance while exporting opportunity.

Consider cocoa. Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana together account for well over half of global cocoa output, yet the most profitable segments of the chocolate industry remain concentrated elsewhere. The same pattern is visible in cotton, cashews, lithium and pineapples.

The issue is not resource scarcity. It is value-chain depth. There are, however, examples of what deliberate market building can achieve.

Morocco has spent two decades positioning itself as an industrial bridge to Europe. Through infrastructure investment, regulatory alignment and targeted skills development, the country has become a major automotive manufacturing hub. Automotive exports to Europe have risen from about $2.5 billion to roughly $10 billion over the past decade, according to BCG’s analysis.

Morocco did not industrialise by waiting for market forces alone. It built ports, trained workers and aligned standards with customer requirements. In other words, it organised the market.

For Nigeria, the lesson is immediate

The country possesses one of Africa’s largest consumer markets, vast agricultural resources, an entrepreneurial private sector and increasingly sophisticated manufacturers. It is already home to integrated industrial bets such as the Dangote Industries Limited ecosystem, where limestone becomes cement, natural gas becomes fertiliser and crude oil is refined domestically rather than exported in raw form.

Yet the broader economy still exports too much in unprocessed form and imports too many finished goods. The opportunity is to build sector-by-sector corridors in which Nigerian raw materials are transformed locally into export-ready products.

Cassava into industrial starch and flour. Cocoa into butter and chocolate ingredients. Cotton into garments. Pineapple into juice and dried snacks. Lithium into battery precursors. Nollywood content into globally monetised intellectual property.

Each represents more than a product category. Each is a market system waiting to be organised.

Doing so requires three structural capabilities

First, reliable infrastructure. Factories cannot scale without stable power, efficient ports and competitive logistics.

Second, standards and certification. Premium markets reward consistency and traceability.

Third, patient capital. Industrial value chains often require longer investment horizons than trading businesses.

The BCG report emphasises that success depends on coordinated interventions in trade facilitation, infrastructure and skills. The sequencing matters. Producers need demand visibility; financiers need risk mitigation; workers need capabilities aligned to industrial needs.

No single institution can do this alone. The prize, however, is substantial.

If Africa can substitute even a modest share of Europe’s imports in sectors where the continent has structural strengths, trade can expand well beyond baseline growth projections. More importantly, a greater share of that trade would consist of higher-value products and services rather than raw commodities.

That distinction is critical. Exporting more tonnes does not necessarily create more prosperity. Exporting more value does.

Late in the day, the cassava trucks in Abeokuta are empty. What remains inside the plant is a fine white flour – lighter than the roots that entered, but economically heavier. This is what industrialisation looks like in practice.

Not as an abstract policy ambition, but as a series of decisions to process what is already available, build the systems that move it efficiently and sell it to markets willing to pay more.

Africa’s relationship with Europe may indeed approach $1 trillion over the coming decade. But the most important figure may not be the size of trade itself.

It may be the proportion of that trade that leaves African ports not as raw material, but as finished value.

That is where stronger currencies are built. Where jobs deepen. Where resilience takes root.

And where the continent’s next growth story is likely to be written.