AFCFTA FOR WOMEN
The largest market in the world is opening. Women must be in it.
The African Continental Free Trade Area is building a single market across the continent. Trade is not gender-neutral without deliberate effort, women are left at the margins of the very economy they help drive.
1.4 billion
people in a single African market under the AfCFTA.
Since 2021
trading under the AfCFTA is underway across the continent.
Feb 2024
the AU adopted the AfCFTA Protocol on Women and Youth in Trade.
WHY IT MATTERS
Integration is an opportunity if women are designed in.
Trade agreements can widen gender gaps when they are built without deliberate, targeted measures. Recognising this, African leaders adopted a protocol placing women and youth at the centre of the continent’s trade ecosystem rather than its margins.
The Protocol speaks directly to the barriers women face: limited access to finance, exclusion from policy, and the daily realities of small-scale cross-border trade, much of it carried out by women.
Tindira’s task is to turn a continental instrument into on-the-ground income, helping women use the very tools built for them.
HOW WE RESPOND
From the Protocol to the marketplace.
Every Tindira programme is a bridge between Africa’s integration agenda and a woman’s balance sheet.
Earn More
Access to the export sectors and value chains where trade lifts women’s wages and formalises their work.
Trade More
Practical capability to trade across borders under the AfCFTA customs, standards, digital trade and finance.
Own More
Moving from trading to owning businesses, brands, IP and equity within continental value chains.
Prosper More
Measuring whether integration is actually translating into prosperity for women, through our Prosperity Index.
