Is Your Country Really Ready for Inclusive Digital Trade? The RelauncherMoms Test for AfCFTA Readiness

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is an ambitious trade pact aimed at creating a single continental market for goods and services across 54 African countries. Spanning over 1.4 billion people with a combined GDP of about $3.4 trillion, its goal is to eliminate tariffs on 90% of products and boost intra-African trade. 

The AfCFTA’s digital inclusion framework ensures marginalized groups like MSMEs, women, youth, and rural communities can participate in the digital economy. It is driven by the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol, which mandates the development of harmonized digital IDs, interoperable payments, and paperless trading to overcome historical trade barriers

A genuinely gender-inclusive digital economy would not just let women “participate” in online trade; it would make it normal, safe, and profitable for women-owned and women-led businesses to sell, get paid, prove identity, ship across borders, and resolve disputes across the continent. The AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade already points in that direction: it is meant to create harmonized rules and common principles for inclusive digital trade, and it explicitly pushes interoperability across trade administration documents, electronic authentication, signatures, digital payments, digital identities, cross-border data transfers, and digital infrastructure.

In practice, that means a gender-inclusive system would look mobile-first, low-data, multilingual, compatible with mobile money, and usable by micro, small, and informal businesses. It would also be safe enough that women are not pushed out by online harassment, fraud, or technology-facilitated gender-based violence. That is important because the digital gender gap is still large: International Telecommunication Union’s 2025 data show 77% of men and 71% of women use the internet globally, and in Africa only 31% of women used the internet in 2024 versus 43% of men. The World Bank also says women in low- and middle-income countries are 15% less likely than men to use mobile internet.

What it would take to build is a full ecosystem, not a single program. On the policy side, countries would need laws and regulations that make cross-border digital trade easy to do and easy to trust: interoperable identity and payments, clear rules for data flows, simple compliance, consumer protection, cybersecurity, and practical digital-trade procedures that small firms can actually use. The African Union’s Digital Trade Protocol and its data-provision guidelines are the legal base for that kind of system.

On the infrastructure side, inclusion means affordable connectivity, decent network quality, reliable electricity, and access to devices and local support points. That matters because the World Bank describes Africa’s digital constraints as underdeveloped infrastructure, unaffordable connectivity, weak skills, and policy gaps; ITU likewise notes that affordability, skills, and connectivity quality hit rural communities, women, and lower-income users hardest.

On the institutional side, women’s access improves when governments do not work alone. UN Women’s AfCFTA work highlights barriers such as limited access to productive resources and financing, gender-based violence, unpaid care burdens, and time poverty; UN Trade and Development’s recent Africa report on women digital entrepreneurs adds that the biggest fixes are better access to finance, export-readiness support, inclusive procurement, simplified compliance, and stronger digital and business skills training.

So the build-out can adopt the following concrete design rules:

1. Make it cheap enough to use from a phone; 

2. Make onboarding and compliance simple enough for microbusinesses;

3. Build payments and identity so women can transact without cash dependence; 

4. Create anti-harassment protections; 

5. Fund women-led firms through public procurement, export support, and credit lines. 

That is the difference between a digital economy that women can “enter” and one they can actually own, scale, and shape.