The Workers Powering African Trade Are Still Missing From the Policy Table

Africa’s trade ambitions depend heavily on informal workers and small businesses, still, many remain largely absent from the policy processes shaping markets, borders and labour conditions. ILO research highlights a widening representation gap and points to cooperatives, worker organizations and AfCFTA mechanisms as potential routes to bring informal actors closer to decision-making.

Africa's push toward deeper trade integration is colliding with a basic feature of its labour markets: many of the people producing, transporting and selling traded goods operate outside formal employment structures. International Labour Organization (ILO) research indicates that informal workers and small businesses are deeply embedded in African trade, yet their access to the institutions shaping trade and labour policy remains limited.

The imbalance is difficult to dismiss as a marginal governance problem. More than three quarters of jobs connected to trade and global supply chains are informal across 11 African countries for which data are available, while those countries together account for 45 per cent of employment on the continent. Across Africa as a whole, more than 85 per cent of employment is informal, the highest regional rate globally, according to the ILO.

The result is a widening institutional gap: trade policies can reach deeply into livelihoods that are barely represented when those policies are discussed. Formal exporters generally have clearer access to policymakers, while informal workers, own-account operators and small enterprises may struggle even to enter consultations or obtain information about measures intended to support them.

Trade policy is formal. African labour markets largely are not

Much of the difficulty begins with the categories through which labour-market representation has traditionally been organized. Workers are usually represented through labour organizations, while businesses enter policy discussions through employers' groups and industry bodies. Informal economies frequently blur those distinctions.

A person may be a worker, an own-account operator and the proprietor of a tiny enterprise at the same time. Such overlapping economic identities make it harder to determine which institution should represent them and leave conventional worker-employer divisions poorly suited to parts of the labour market where formal contractual relationships are weak or absent.

Evidence gathered through an ILO survey and consultations with more than 70 stakeholders in Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Uganda points to the consequences. Participants from workers' and employers' organizations, governments and civil society indicated that established consultation systems frequently fail to reach informal workers and enterprises.

Representation cannot be measured simply by whether a consultation process exists. A government may have formal channels for discussing trade policy while large sections of the workforce remain effectively outside them. The deeper issue is whether institutions built around formal employment can adapt to economies where informality remains the dominant employment condition.

Agriculture and border trade expose the scale of the disconnect

Few sectors reveal the imbalance more clearly than agriculture. Almost 98 per cent of agricultural workers in Africa are informally employed, according to the ILO, with many positioned in lower tiers of supply chains and maintaining limited connections with large suppliers and buyers.

Their economic role can be substantial even when their negotiating position is weak. Decisions involving trade rules, supply relationships or market arrangements may travel down the chain to farmers and workers who had little opportunity to influence the policy environment in which those decisions were made.

Informal cross-border trade creates a parallel challenge. Women constitute the majority of informal cross-border traders in many parts of Africa, while traders can face harassment and insecurity at borders, difficulty accessing finance and obstacles in understanding regional trade rules.

These constraints make participation in trade governance more than a procedural question. Groups already facing barriers in carrying out everyday economic activity are also being asked to navigate consultation systems and institutional structures that may be distant from the way their livelihoods actually function.

The representation gap consequently runs through both production and exchange. Farmers at the lower end of supply chains and traders moving goods across borders may be integral to regional commerce while remaining among the least institutionally connected actors in debates over how that commerce should be governed.

Collective representation could bridge the institutional divide

Closing the gap does not necessarily require building entirely new institutions. One route identified by the ILO involves connecting cooperatives and informal-economy associations with workers' and employers' organizations that already participate in established social-dialogue structures.

Ghana offers an example of how such a bridge can operate. The Ghana National Cocoa Farmers Association represents around 680,000 of an estimated 800,000 cocoa farmers and is affiliated with the Ghana Federation of Labour. The federation has represented farmers in discussions with government, including over adjustments to cocoa farm-gate prices.

The significance of the arrangement lies in the connection it creates between a large group of producers and an established labour institution. Informal workers and producers do not necessarily need to fit neatly into traditional employment categories if organizations capable of aggregating their interests can connect them with existing policy channels.

Trade agreements could provide another route. Under the African Continental Free Trade Area, National Implementation Committees can serve as forums where governments, workers' and employers' organizations and civil society participate in discussions on trade decisions that carry labour-market consequences.

Trade-union representatives already participate in such committees in Ghana, Kenya, Namibia, Nigeria and Rwanda. Strengthening links between these bodies and organizations representing informal workers and enterprises could broaden the range of labour-market realities entering national trade discussions.

Access alone, however, does not guarantee influence. Representation becomes meaningful only when organizations are able to bring concerns into discussions early enough to affect decisions, rather than being consulted after the essential policy direction has already been settled.

AfCFTA's inclusiveness will depend on who can shape implementation

The tension surrounding informal representation is becoming more consequential as African trade integration advances. AfCFTA creates institutional mechanisms through which governments and organized stakeholders can engage, but the effectiveness of those mechanisms will depend partly on whether they connect with the labour markets they are intended to serve.

Formalization remains central to improving employment conditions, and the ILO does not present greater political participation as a substitute for moving workers and enterprises toward formal arrangements. The two processes instead address different problems: formalization concerns the structure and conditions of employment, while representation concerns who has a voice while economic rules are being written and implemented.

Waiting for informality to disappear before making policy institutions more inclusive would leave a large share of Africa's workforce outside trade discussions for an uncertain period. Building channels into existing institutions offers a way of addressing the representation deficit without treating informality as a permanent endpoint.