Africa's Women at the Border Built the Free Trade Area First

I arrived at Aflao border from Lomé on a bike, basking under the scorching sun with my helmet on. I got off the bike amidst the hustle and bustle of the border. I was about to cross into another country called Ghana.

At the border, I was approached by an agent offering to help me cross seamlessly, as he promised. I refused, heading towards the officials at the border, confident as I had my ECOWAS Nigerian international passport. While in the queue waiting my turn, I overheard an official asking a lady for 2,000 CFA despite her presenting her ECOWAS ID card. It dawned on me that I would have to pay too. I went back out to meet the earlier agent that promised me seamless passthrough for a fee, because his was cheaper than the officer's and I was faced with no choice.

While waiting for the agent to organise my passthrough, I looked around. The majority of people passing through were women carrying goods. I saw an informal channel through which people crossed while paying a certain fee, without any IDs. I became curious, so I asked the agent. He explained that these were the Ewe people whose territory sits on both sides of this border. The border did not create them. Colonial boundaries were drawn through their land. What I was watching at that informal channel was not a workaround. It was people moving through their own land.

They did not inherit a trade route. They were the trade route.

I crossed through the border seamlessly as the agent promised, without paying any additional fees except the one I paid him. He seemed to know the officials, as the way was paved for me. That proved to me that my ECOWAS passport was not enough for my passage to Ghana.

At the other side of Aflao border, Ghana, I headed to the bus terminal to board a three-hour-plus bus trip to Accra, the country's capital. While in the queue, I noticed the dominance of women, each carrying their goods in baskets and packaged nylon bags. After talking at length with the woman next to me on the queue, I realized the goods in those nylon bags were not random. Each one was chosen against a calculation: what costs less in one market than it sells for in another. The women understood the corridor's price intelligence better than any report I had read on West African trade. They were not trading on hope. They were trading on margin, on years of knowing the route, the buyer, and the price on both ends. That knowledge did not come from a summit. It was built from crossing.

This is regional trade happening in practice, facilitated by these industrious women. It exists despite the friction impeding it, like the border dues I paid before being able to cross.

The policies targeting regional trade and the free trade area do emphasise the need for intra-continental trade. Africa's women did not wait for the free trade area to be declared. They built one. On that bus I boarded, with those goods bought across the border and heading for the capital, the intra-continental trade was already moving.

What I witnessed at that border was not informality. It was a different architecture of commerce, and the honest question it raised was not how to formalise it, but whether the frameworks we keep building are starting from the right foundation at all.

The woman I watched cross that border, moving goods from one country to another, certainly does not need incentives to participate in regional or intra-continental trading. She was not there because a policy created an opportunity. She knew the stall she was heading to, the price she would pay, the agent at the crossing, the bus schedule, and the customers on the other side. Her commerce intelligence was built from repetition, from relationship, and refined across years of crossing the same route. Nothing about her movement required external encouragement. It is her default.

She was not waiting for Africa to build its trade infrastructure. She was the trade infrastructure. What stood between her and scale was not ambition, not knowledge, nor the will to trade. It was the agent's fee. The unofficial due at the border. The 2,000 CFA asked of her despite the ID card she presented. Remove that friction and she does not need a new programme. She scales herself.

If the commerce was already there, the route was already known, and the woman was already crossing, what exactly has the framework been waiting to begin?