The Informal Economy and African-Language AI in the AfCFTA Digital Trade Regime
The AfCFTA serves as the map for African trade and economic development, its mandate charging the continent toward an economic utopia. Yet its digital protocol, with a core scope built around diversity and vulnerable populations, excludes 90 percent of Africa's economic engine : the informal sector. This exclusion is further compounded by the language exclusion informal enterprises face, where digital platforms and AI systems meant to power digital trade have yet to incorporate indigenous languages, stifled by a data drought that is decades in the making. This paper argues that the interaction of the Digital Trade Protocol and its Rules of Origin Annex leaves informal cross-border traders without a clear, proportionate route to digital trade benefits, and that unequal African-language AI capacity turns the Protocol's promise of legal inclusion into practical exclusion.
