By Sanyaolu Oluwatamilore Oluwabusola
On 24 September 2026, I attended a session of the African Feminist Macroeconomics Academy (AFMA), one on feminist trade and regional integration. I left the session with a question I keep returning to. It is a simple question, almost deceptively so: When we talk about African goods crossing borders freely, why do we so rarely ask whether the people behind those goods can cross just as freely?
African goods move through a border in a fairly straightforward sequence. African people, moving through that same border, encounter a question mark instead. That asymmetry, goods flowing one way while people stall at a checkpoint, was the opening image of the session, and it set the tone for everything that followed.
This session was part of a broader AFMA webinar series that has been building on itself, having previously explored trade from a feminist perspective through the lens of the African Continental Free Trade Area and its impact on women.
The intention behind the series is to extend these conversations beyond the classroom, strengthening advocacy, influencing policy, and building collective action, connecting theory and practice in a way that centres women's voices in discussions that are so often held without them.
The session began by reframing something I had honestly never questioned before. Trade is an exchange of products. It is also about people, power, and the conditions under which economic activity happens at all.
Who produces? Who trades? Who benefits? And perhaps the most uncomfortable question of the three: who bears the cost when policy, borders, and markets do not work equally for everyone?
That reframing moves trade out of the realm of abstract statistics and back into the realm of lived experience, which is exactly where a feminist macroeconomic lens insists it belongs.
A huge share of African trade happens outside formal systems entirely, carried by women whose work is sophisticated, essential, and almost entirely uncounted. Women are producers, traders, transporters, distributors, and consumers, often moving across several of these roles simultaneously rather than occupying one neat category. And critically, informality does not mean insignificance.
What determines whether a woman can participate in that trade is rarely just her product or her market. It is unpaid care, time, safety, and mobility, the invisible conditions that shape whether she can show up at all.
The Border as Lived Experience
One of the most vivid parts of the session was watching a trade agreement's language collide with what actually happens at a border.
A policy document might say "reduce barriers." A trader experiences that same policy as waiting, fees, paperwork, harassment, uncertainty, and lost income. Immigration, customs, documents, finance, safety, market access, all of it converges at a single physical checkpoint, and that is precisely where regional integration stops being a concept and becomes someone's Tuesday morning.
Two case examples made this painfully concrete.
At the Himo, Tanzania to Mwakitau, Kenya crossing, women living and trading near the border often have their entire mobility confined to a narrow zone, determined by whether they hold the right ID, passport, or health certificate.
Also, at Hillacondji, between Benin and Togo, participants described persistent documentation demands, inconsistent checks, harassment, extortion, and language barriers, despite free movement existing on paper. A border, it turns out, can restrict someone's entire life while remaining almost invisible on a map.
This is the gap the session kept circling back to, consolidating the fact that a policy can be formally gender-neutral while producing deeply unequal consequences. In essence, free movement on paper does not automatically become free movement in practice. And that quote stuck very deeply with me
I found myself sitting with the word "informal" differently after this session. It is a label that quietly hides the scale and sophistication of women's economic activity across the continent.
Many women operate across multiple points in a value chain – producer, trader, transporter, distributor, all at once – working entirely outside systems built around formal firms and large-scale trade. And because policy is so often designed with those large, formal firms in mind, women get treated as beneficiaries of trade policy rather than economic actors with agency in their own right.
Real recognition, the session argued, has to include voice, protection, finance, information, and market access, not just inclusion in a beneficiary list.
That gap between policy and awareness was made concrete by an example shared during the session: women market traders in Mombasa who had never even heard of the Mombasa Trade Bill, a policy directly shaping the conditions of their own trade. You cannot call a policy inclusive if the people it governs do not know it exists
Recognition without information is not recognition at all. It is little wonder, then, that one of the concrete follow-ups from the session is a simplified guide on trade policies, written specifically for women traders rather than for policymakers, so that understanding a policy is no longer a privilege reserved for those already fluent in its language.
AfCFTA and the Feminist Test
The African Continental Free Trade Area came up as the clearest live example of all this tension. AfCFTA's ambition, a continental market, connected value chains, and real implementation, is significant. But the feminist question was never simply whether trade increases under AfCFTA. It is who benefits, and under what conditions. Who produces? Who trades? Who decides? Who benefits? Who bears the risk?
Those same questions, right?
This is because gender-responsive implementation, the session insisted, has to move beyond "gender is mentioned" in a policy document. It has to show up:
As voice: “Are women traders actually shaping decisions?”
As data: “Can we even see gendered trade realities?”
As finance: “Can women access capital and trade finance?”
As safety: “Are border crossings safe?”
As mobility: “Can women actually move?”
And as accountability: “Who acts when commitments fail?”
Six concrete tests, not one vague aspiration.
One other idea from this session I keep returning to is the question: “Who enables the trader to trade?” Behind every trader is childcare, elder care, household management, and community obligations, unpaid work that makes her economic participation possible in the first place. Time, the session reminded us, is an economic resource. Care is economic infrastructure.
If trade policy ignores care, it does not become gender-neutral by omission. It becomes incomplete.
The session laid out a chain I have not been able to stop thinking about: often, documentation leads to delay or restriction, which leads to lost time, which leads to lost income, which leads to less participation. At every link in that chain, it is women cross-border traders, migrants, border-community families, and caregivers who absorb the cost.
The questions worth asking at each border, the session suggested, are blunt ones: “who has the documents, who can afford the delays, who faces harassment, and who can actually challenge unfair practice when it happens?”
A woman does not simply need a market to sell into. She needs an entire ecosystem that makes participation possible: safe mobility, documentation, information, finance, infrastructure, legal protection, social protection, and voice. Regional integration, in other words, is not only an economic project. It is a question of power, dignity, and the ability to participate at all.
What I appreciated most about this session is that it refused to leave “women should benefit” as a vague aspiration. It mapped out concrete points of leverage at every level: national (African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) implementation, trade and gender policy, budgets, border authorities), regional (East African Community – EAC, Economic Community of West African States – ECOWAS, Southern African Development Community – SADC, Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa – COMESA, cross-border coalitions), continental (African Union – AU and AfCFTA institutions, women and youth mechanisms), and movement-level (trader associations, feminist organisations, media and research, border communities themselves).
Following the journey from continental commitment, through the African Union, down through a Regional Economic Community, into national policy, through a border institution, and finally to an actual trader standing at a checkpoint, made one thing unmistakable: at every one of those points, someone can either change the experience or leave it exactly as it is.
And at every one of those points, the question of who is at the table matters just as much as what gets decided there. It is one of the reasons the session's organisers are already planning to gather participants' own experiences directly, through a feedback mechanism meant to surface, in participants' own words, what trade policy actually feels like from where they stand, rather than relying only on secondhand case studies.
Near the end, the session posed something closer to a provocation than a conclusion: what would African trade look like if women designed it?
Not what would we tweak, but what would we measure (livelihoods, safety, time, care, income, mobility), what would we prioritise (finance, infrastructure, protection, mobility, voice), and who would actually be at the table (traders, workers, feminists, youth, border communities themselves)?
The goal, as the session put it plainly, is not simply women benefiting from trade policy. It is women shaping it.
One thread of the discussion I had not expected, but found genuinely important, was the reminder that regional integration cannot be discussed honestly without reckoning with colonial legacy. Many of the borders traders are navigating today were not drawn around African economic or cultural logic. They were drawn by colonial powers, often cutting through shared languages, ethnic communities, and historic trade routes that predate the border itself.
That history still shapes the present in very practical ways. Language differences between neighbouring countries, the absence of a single shared currency, and inconsistent documentation systems all complicate cross-border trade today, and all trace back to that same colonial inheritance. The session argued that genuine regional integration requires more than harmonised trade policy. It requires rebuilding a shared African identity and cultural understanding across borders that were never really ours to begin with.
A woman trading between two countries that speak different colonial languages and use different currencies is not simply facing “administrative friction”. She is navigating the residue of decisions made long before she was born, by people who never had her in mind at all.
Listening to this session, I found it impossible not to connect it back to our own work. We are a Pan-African storytelling organisation whose mission sits at the intersection of gender equality, justice, and social and behaviour change communication, and this conversation is, in many ways, a direct extension of that mission into an area we do not always associate with gender work: trade and mobility.
The women described in this session, the trader confined to a narrow zone near Himo, the woman navigating harassment and extortion at Hillacondji, are not statistics to us.
They are exactly the kind of story Shades of Us exists to tell: the ones that live in the gap between a policy that reads well on paper and a life that experiences something else entirely at the checkpoint. Our storytelling has always tried to make invisible labour visible, and this session was, essentially, a masterclass in why that invisibility is not accidental. It is often built into how policy is designed, measured, and implemented.
There is also a direct line here to conversations we have already been part of, the same AFMA thread connecting tax justice, the right to care, and now feminist trade. Each session keeps arriving at the same underlying truth: economic systems that look neutral on paper are rarely neutral in practice, and someone, usually women, absorbs the cost of that gap.
If a woman's mobility, safety, and economic participation depend partly on whether her story gets told and heard by the people with power to change border practice, then storytelling is not adjacent to this advocacy. It is one of the tools that makes advocacy possible.
The session closed with a line that has stayed with me: if integration is about people, then people's everyday realities must shape the integration agenda. A truly integrated Africa is not simply one where goods cross borders easily. It is one where the people who produce, trade, care, create, and build our economies can participate with dignity, safety, and power.
See. Question. Organise. Transform.
That was the session's closing call, and it feels like an apt one to carry forward, not just as a reflection on a webinar attended, but as a standard to check our own work against going forward.
It is also, fittingly, a call the session's own organisers are already answering: the next installment in this webinar series is already being planned, alongside a deliberate effort to help participants carry what they have learned back into their own communities, so that the conversation does not end when the call does.
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