Following a year of heightened geopolitical volatility and diplomatic strain, South Africa closed its G20 presidency in Johannesburg last November with a Leaders Declaration that outlined shared commitments on disaster resilience, renewable energy capacity and energy efficiency, debt sustainability, and the leveraging of critical minerals. Significantly, the summit proceeded despite strong criticism from Washington, and following a year of successive tariff hikes, abrupt policy reversals, and increasingly adversarial diplomacy. This reflects an emerging global reality in which economic power and growth are dispersed across multiple centres rather than dominated by a single economic bloc.
This shift carries direct implications for global trade and strategy. Competing trade regimes, divergent climate and sustainability priorities, and contested supply chains, are reshaping economic power dynamics and, along with them, Africa’s position and growth opportunities within the global economy. Speaking at the World Economic Forum in Davos earlier this year, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney recognised this shift, acknowledging that the global economy faces “a rupture, not a transition”, in which stronger powers have used economic integration as a weapon, leveraging tariffs and financial infrastructure for coercion and exploiting supply chain vulnerabilities.
Against this context of a global economy shaped by multipolarity, supply-chain constraints, climate risks, and growing energy and resource dependencies, Africa’s strategic relevance is increasingly evident. While the continent remains among the world’s most climate-vulnerable and debt-stressed regions, it also holdssome 30% of the world’s known critical mineral reserves and vast renewable energy potential. Together, if effectively leveraged, these seemingly opposing conditions position African countries in an increasing role in global supply chains and energy transitions with enormous potential to support future growth and influence the continent’s position in the global economy.
In addition, recent data from the World Economic Outlook shows GDP growth in advanced economies lagging behind emerging markets, with India, Indonesia, and China having some of the highest projected growth rates, while France, Italy, and Japan are projected to have some of the lowest.
Notably, despite most of the region being unrepresented in the G20 forum, other than through African Union membership, many African countries are expected to experience some of the highest growth rates globally, with South Sudan, Guinea, Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Ethiopia, Benin, Niger, Côte d’Ivoire, Zambia, and Tanzania having the highest projections on the continent.
Critically, the Johannesburg declaration reached a consensus on several African priorities, including acknowledging the need to address unsustainable debt burdens on low-income countries, lowering the cost of obtaining capital for developing economies, expanding energy access and access to clean cooking, strengthening disaster resilience, and supporting value addition in critical minerals supply chains. This final declaration consensus is especially significant given increasing geopolitical fragmentation and a decline in multilateral trust.
In doing so, South Africa’s G20 presidency effectively reasserted the global forum as a platform for development-centred dialogue, explicitly anchored in the recognition of Africa’s structural constraints. While this consensus falls short of being binding, it does establish a shared global reference point that acknowledges the need to adapt financial governance systems and trade norms and to reform institutional frameworks in an era of intensifying economic volatility, increased securitisation and competition, and deepening geopolitical uncertainty.
As global trade becomes more competitive and politically motivated, major economies are progressively competing for new markets, secure supply chains, and access to strategic resources. This shift, in which power is increasingly dispersed rather than concentrated and centralised, provides an opportunity for African economies to leverage long-standing weaknesses into strategic relevance.
However, translating its developmental priorities into strategic leverage has proven a challenge for African countries, as persistent coordination failures, unequal trade relationships, favoured extractive terms over industrialisation objectives, commodity dependence, small domestic markets, infrastructure gaps, and critically limited technical capacity and investment negotiations frequently constrain continental growth.
As a result, African economies have often been positioned against one another as competitors for market access. This reinforces hierarchical dependencies on external partners rather than establishing stronger, lateral trade dynamics within the continent. And while frameworks such as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) exist to address these challenges, their impact is often constrained by limited policy coordination and inconsistent, uneven implementation. As such, overcoming these constraints is vital to how effectively African states can ensure growing relevance in global trade and translate that growth into economic transformation and influence.
As African economies enter a period marked by global economic rupture, increasingly moving toward a multipolar reality and defined by a narrower conception of US global responsibility and involvement, the strategic context for trade and development engagements shifts. African states are no longer navigating a central and concentrated trading system but rather must navigate multiple, often competing centres of power that present heightened risks and opportunities.
While the continent’s growth projections give a cautiously optimistic outlook, initiatives such as AfCFTA are central to enabling diversified trade and negotiations on more favourable and coordinated terms. Such frameworks underscore a broader reality of the current global moment, which recognises that resilience, strategic autonomy, and competitiveness are more effectively achieved through shared standards and complementary action than through fragmented, inward-looking approaches, enabling African states to strengthen their global standing more sustainably.
Mischka Moosa is a data journalist at GGA. She holds a Bachelor of Social Science with majors in Gender Studies and Political Science that she obtained from the University of Cape Town. Her focus of interest is on decolonial approaches to justice, development and transformation in Africa.
