CARIBBEAN | Eighty Per Cent Untapped: The Africa–Caribbean Trade That Isn’t Happening

Eight in every ten dollars of Africa’s export potential to the Caribbean go untapped, a new ITC–Afreximbank report finds — and the reasons are depressingly familiar: no ships, no credit, no trusted partners.

MONTEGO BAY, Jamaica,November 3, 2026 -  | Calvin G. Brown | For all the speeches about a bond forged across the Middle Passage, Africa and the Caribbean still barely trade with each other. A report launched Tuesday in St. John’s, Antigua and Barbuda, finally puts a number on the gap — and on the prize. Annual trade in goods and services between the two regions could reach US$1.65 billion by 2030, excluding mineral fuels, if both sides do the unglamorous work of actually connecting their economies.

The study, Reshaping Africa-Caribbean Trade: Opportunities for Economic Transformation, was released by the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) on the sidelines of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. Its headline finding is blunt: roughly 80 per cent of Africa’s annual goods export potential to the Caribbean goes unrealised. Despite what the authors call deep historical and cultural links, trade between the regions remains a sliver of each side’s overall commerce — this in spite of obvious complementarities across agribusiness, manufacturing, services and the creative economy.

Read plainly, the report is less a discovery than an indictment. The opportunity has been sitting in full view for six decades of Caribbean independence. What has been missing is not sentiment but shipping lanes, financing and the basic commercial plumbing that lets a Kingston distributor find a Lagos manufacturer and trust that the invoice will be paid.

Where the money is

The numbers are built on trade and export potential analysis, sector-by-sector assessments and a survey of 1,175 businesses and business support organisations across both regions. On the African side, the untapped goods trade spans processed food and animal feed, chemicals, minerals and metals, apparel and textiles, and leather and footwear. For the Caribbean, the report is candid: the region’s real export edge lies not in goods but in services, where it identifies US$481 million in potential — tourism, transport services and the creative industries.

That is a finding Jamaica should read twice. Tourism, logistics and culture are precisely the cards this country holds. If the Africa–Caribbean relationship is to be more than diplomatic photo opportunities, Jamaica’s hotel operators, shipping agents and music and film producers are the ones the report is talking to.

Shared heritage has never been in short supply. Ships, credit and trust have been.

What is standing in the way

The obstacles the surveyed businesses describe will surprise nobody who has tried to move a container between Tema and Port Antonio: high transport costs, limited direct shipping links, regulatory barriers, scarce access to finance and real difficulty in identifying trusted commercial partners. Without direct sailings, cargo typically detours through third ports in Europe or North America, adding weeks and cost to goods that are, on paper, natural trading partners. Add a patchwork of customs regimes and the absence of easy cross-currency settlement, and the 80 per cent gap explains itself.

ITC Executive Director Pamela Coke-Hamilton, the Jamaican-born economist who launched the report, framed it as a response to turbulence in the global trading system. Countries, she said, need to “strengthen regional ties and invest in value addition, to build resilience.” The next step, in her telling, is practical: better market intelligence, improved logistics and greater access to finance for the firms willing to try.

Afreximbank’s wager

Afreximbank has already put money where the rhetoric is. Denys Denya, the bank’s Senior Executive Vice President, pointed to its CARICOM office in Barbados, roughly US$1 billion in approved transactions and a US$5 billion regional financing commitment. The bank is also pushing deposit mobilisation through CENDEP, business matchmaking through its annual Afri-Caribbean Trade and Investment Forum, local-currency settlement through the CAPSS payment system and creative-industry links through CANEX.

Denya’s line that the two regions must “transform a shared history into shared prosperity” is the kind of phrase that fills conference halls. The more useful part of his statement is the admission that financing alone will not do it: the report, he said, is a roadmap for turning potential into bankable deals, and that roadmap runs through transport and logistics as much as through the bank’s balance sheet.

The Caribbean’s homework

The report’s prescriptions are aimed as much at governments as at banks. It calls for targeted action on market intelligence and matchmaking; expanded trade finance and payment solutions; stronger transport and logistics connectivity; sector-specific value chain development; regulatory cooperation and improved market access; and tighter partnerships among business support organisations. It also insists that cooperation should move beyond traditional goods trade into joint investment ventures, digital services, creative industries and tourism.

Here is where the hard question lands on this side of the Atlantic. CARICOM governments have signed the memoranda, hosted the forums and welcomed the delegations. What they have not yet done is harmonise the rules, fix the port bottlenecks or give their own exporters a reason to look east instead of north. A region that struggles to trade with itself is not well placed to lecture anyone about pan-African solidarity.

Afreximbank has brought a cheque book and a timetable. The ITC has brought the data. The 2030 figure is not a forecast; it is a ceiling that will only be reached if someone builds the ladder. Shared heritage has never been in short supply. Ships, credit and trust have been — and the clock on this decade is already running.

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