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Listening to Moneyweb at Midday. Now, Africa has spent years negotiating trade agreements, most notably Agoa, and that is in the news right now. But is it actually becoming any more competitive? A new Africa Export Competitiveness Report paints a worrying, a troubling picture. Despite the continent's enormous natural resources, Africa accounts for less than 3% of global merchandise exports, and more than three-quarters of what it sells abroad are still primary.

Goods. This is an important issue to explore. I'm going to talk to Amit Kapoor, who is chair of the Institute for Competitiveness in India and a lecturer at Stanford University. Amit, welcome to the program. So, Africa has signed all the trade agreements. Why then are we still failing as a continent to become a serious global export competitor? What's the fundamental difficulty here? So, thanks, Jeremy, for having me on the show. But you raise a very important question.

And the fundamental issue is that Africa has made considerable progress in creating the institutional framework for trade, but this is not yet translated into, say, productive capabilities required to compete globally. There is an important distinction between providing access to the market and enabling firms to participate competitively in the market. So, as you look at the report that you were talking about, the Africa Competitiveness Report, this clearly highlights the disconnect that exists because despite its

Substantial resource endowments, like Africa is great in terms of resource endowments. It just accounted for close to about 2.63% of global merchandise exports in 2025, and it remained below 3% since 2014. And I would say that there are two or three structural reasons, so possibly three, that drive this. The first is the composition of Africa's exports. So, as you said in the initial introduction, nearly 76.7% of merchandise.

Merchandise exports in 25 consisted of primary goods with fuels alone accounting for about 30%. While Africa possesses significant natural resources, much of the value addition continues to take place elsewhere. So, what is happening is that we are just, as Africa, we are just exporting resources, basic resources. So, the continent supplies approximately, say, 75% of global manganese, 70% of cobalt, but just captures about 1% of the value generated through clean energy.