AfCFTA Linkage Explorer
Merchandise trade between African countries, drawn one flow at a time, with the architecture built on top of it carried on the country labels rather than in a separate legend: the AfCFTA register, the payments system and the Secretariat’s Guided Trade Initiative.
Every flow is reported twice. The exporter declares what it sent and the importer declares what it received, and the two declarations are separate statistics that need not agree. This page draws a ribbon only where both sides report the flow and the two figures agree. Exports are recorded free on board and imports including cost, insurance and freight, so the importer’s figure is first divided by 1.10 to strip the carriage the exporter’s does not carry; the two must then agree within 20 percent of their average. The rule and both constants are printed under the diagram.
Where they disagree, the ribbon is hatched and both figures are printed. Neither is corrected and neither is preferred. Mirror-statistics divergence in African trade is large and well documented, and a diagram that averaged the two sides would hide the one thing worth knowing.
The year is a control, not a decision taken out of sight. The page carries the latest three years the matrix publishes. The newest is reliably the thinnest, because countries report to UNCTAD with a lag and the matrix fills in behind itself, so drawing only the latest would say something about how empty intra-African trade statistics are that is really a statement about the calendar.
Where one side reports and the other does not, or neither does, nothing is drawn. An empty Sankey is the honesty. The counts of what could not be drawn sit beside the diagram at the same weight as the diagram, because for most pairs of African countries the answer is that the statistics do not describe the flow at all.
Open the explorer in its own tab, worth doing on a small screen, where the whole viewport goes to the diagram instead of a frame inside a page.
Open the continent first and read the counts under the diagram before the diagram. Compare the number of ordered pairs both sides report and agree on with the number neither side reports at all, then pick a country and read the same counts for it. Ask what a continental trade share means when it is assembled from a matrix this thin, and what a negotiator in Accra would need before the tariff schedules could be monitored rather than merely agreed.
- Put Nigeria on the screen, then Ghana, and look for a flow that appears as a hatched ribbon in both views. Read the two figures. Say which of the two governments has the stronger incentive to report the number it reports, and what the customs record on each side would have to look like for both to be right.
- Colour is the AfCFTA register and weight is the payments system. Find a country that has deposited its instrument of ratification and appears in almost no ribbon, and say what that combination tells you about the distance between an agreement in force and a trade flow anyone can measure.
The registers on the country labels are the same fields the country cards carry, with each register’s own date beside it. Which release every number comes from is set out on the About the data page.
All 54 country cards · Growth Pole Map · Balance-Sheet Africa · About the data