Intra-African trade reached $220.3 billion in 2024, a 12.4 percent increase from the previous year. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is beginning to deliver. Tariff lines are being liberalised. The Guided Trade Initiative now spans 37 member states. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System is reducing the cost of transacting in local currencies across a continent that operates 42 of them. For the first time in a generation, the architecture of continental integration looks genuinely functional.
And yet, Africa still trades more with Europe and Asia than it does with itself. Intra-African trade accounts for only around 14 percent of the continent’s total trade flows, compared to roughly 60 percent in Asia and nearly 70 percent in Europe. The ambition is clear. The frameworks are multiplying. What remains stubbornly absent is the connective tissue that would allow Africa’s innovation capacity to power, not merely accompany, that integration.
The continent has spent the past two decades building national innovation agencies. From the Technology Innovation Agency in South Africa to the Commission for Science and Technology in Tanzania, from the Kenya National Innovation Agency to counterpart bodies across West, Central, and North Africa, these institutions exist to bridge public policy with private sector ingenuity and academic knowledge. They are, in design, exactly the kind of institutions that should be driving the structural economic transformation AfCFTA promises.
The problem is that they operate largely in isolation from one another.
A landmark 2024 synthesis report by the Trilateral Research Chair in Transformative Innovation at the University of Johannesburg found that while most African innovation agencies hold broad national mandates, the majority cited poor coordination among agencies and misaligned policies as major operational barriers. Over 80 percent of respondents in that study expressed strong support for a continental network that could facilitate policy learning, joint programming, and knowledge exchange. The demand for connection is not aspirational. It is institutional and documented.
This is the structural gap that the Innovation Agencies in Africa (IAA) Network, launched at Kenya Innovation Week in November 2024, was established to address. Convening national innovation agencies across the continent, the network provides the platform for what individual agencies cannot achieve on their own: shared intelligence, coordinated advocacy, and a unified voice in continental policy spaces.
The stakes of getting this right are significant. The African Union’s Science, Technology and Innovation Strategy for Africa 2034 (STISA-2034), formally launched in February 2026, sets out an ambitious decade-long agenda for positioning STI at the centre of Africa’s development trajectory. Its predecessor, STISA-2024, was assessed by the AU Commission itself as having suffered from inadequate funding mechanisms, ineffective coordination, and weak governance architecture. The review was frank: good strategy without the institutional infrastructure to implement it produces good documents, not good outcomes.
STISA-2034 acknowledges this directly, placing “ensuring African ownership and visibility” and “a focus on initiatives that are financially sound and sustainable” among its core guiding principles. But ownership and sustainability require actors. They require institutions that are not merely consulted during strategy design, but formally embedded in implementation architecture. National innovation agencies are precisely those actors. A networked continental body of such agencies is the mechanism through which STISA-2034 can avoid the fate of its predecessor.
The AfCFTA dimension makes urgency more acute. The agreement’s Digital Trade Protocol, adopted in February 2024, calls for harmonised digital regulations, cross-border data flows, and coordinated innovation support for small and medium enterprises across the continent. These are not tasks that trade ministries alone can execute. They require the technical capacity of innovation agencies working in concert, sharing regulatory intelligence, co-developing support frameworks, and translating continental protocol into national practice. Without that coordination layer, the Digital Trade Protocol risks becoming another well-crafted instrument that takes a decade to materialise.
Consider what genuine coordination would unlock. A Kenyan innovation agency that has developed expertise in agricultural technology platforms can share those lessons directly with a counterpart in Senegal navigating similar smallholder challenges, rather than both reinventing approaches independently. A South African agency with deep experience in technology transfer mechanisms can mentor a newer body in Botswana building similar capabilities. The knowledge already exists on the continent. What is missing is the structured infrastructure to circulate it.
The UNESCO 2021 Science Report recorded that researcher density in Sub-Saharan Africa stood at 124 per million inhabitants, against more than 4,000 per million in high-income European countries. Africa cannot close that gap country by country. It requires pooling, collaboration, and deliberate peer learning at continental scale. Innovation agencies, connected and coordinated, are the natural vehicle for exactly that.
The IAA Network’s existence is an important start. But a network without formal recognition in continental governance structures will remain peripheral to the decisions that shape the innovation landscape. AU Commission structures, AUDA-NEPAD programming, and AfCFTA implementation committees must formally engage networked innovation agencies as technical counterparts, not occasional consultees. That institutionalisation would transform the network from a promising initiative into a durable feature of Africa’s development architecture.
Africa has invested in building the institutions. The Johannesburg Business School workshop that catalysed IAA in early 2024 drew nearly 50 participants representing agencies, scholars, and international organisations from across the continent and beyond. The convergence of political will was visible. What the continent now requires is the structural follow-through: formal mandates, dedicated resources, and embedded roles for networked innovation agencies within the implementation machinery of both AfCFTA and STISA-2034.
The frameworks are written. The trade architecture is taking shape. The innovation agencies exist. The only thing missing is the decision to connect them deliberately and formally, before another decade of good strategy yields disappointing outcomes.
