Africa is entering a new era of trade with ADAPT (the AfCFTA Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade Initiative), a bold effort to modernize the continent’s commerce ecosystem. The initiative seeks to unify seamless payments, secure data access, and digital identities within a single digital public infrastructure, allowing African countries to trade more securely, transparently, and efficiently.
Led by the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat, in partnership with IOTA, the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, and the World Economic Forum, ADAPT aims to tackle long-standing inefficiencies that have made African trade slow and costly. ADAPT’s technological vision leverages emerging technologies, including IOTA’s public blockchain network, to achieve interoperability across national systems, industry platforms, and digital services.
Currently, customs clearance in many African countries can take up to 14 days, while cross-border payment fees often range between 6% and 9%. ADAPT’s vision is to change that dramatically, digitizing trade documents, creating interoperable digital identities, and leveraging stablecoins to make payments faster and cheaper.
According to Dominik Schiener, Co-founder and Chair of the IOTA Foundation, “The success of using distributed ledger technology in pilot projects in Kenya and Rwanda has made it clear that Africa is ready to embrace these changes. The continent sets the standard for the rest of the world, unlocking immense economic potential and creating a much more level playing field in trade through new financing opportunities for millions of businesses across the continent.”
As AfCFTA Secretary General Wamkele Mene explains: “This initiative is the cornerstone of our vision to create an inclusive and integrated continental market. It is Africa’s blueprint for the digitisation and modernisation of trade: a system that replaces fragmentation with integration, friction with trust, and inefficiency with scale. For too long, African businesses have contended with multiple systems, repetitive compliance processes, and slow cross-border logistics. ADAPT is designed to change this fundamentally. It establishes a trusted, interoperable infrastructure – an African-built backbone for digital identity, documentation, payments, and data exchange – enabling goods, services, and capital to move with the efficiency that the 21st century demands.”
The initiative aims to unlock an estimated $70 billion in additional intra-African trade annually. By streamlining payments and simplifying documentation, small and medium enterprises stand to gain unprecedented access to regional and global markets. The adoption of stablecoins is already gaining momentum: they now represent 43% of crypto transaction volumes in Africa, with countries like Nigeria, South Africa, and Ethiopia leading the way.
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ADAPT will kick off pilot programs in Kenya in early 2026, followed by Ghana, before scaling to all 55 AfCFTA member states over the next decade. These pilots will test the system, proving that digital identities, blockchain-based document verification, and stablecoins can work together to make trade faster, more transparent, and far more efficient.
Sir Tony Blair, Founder and Executive Chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change, said: “My Institute is proud to have worked with the AfCFTA Secretariat, IOTA Foundation, and many public and private sector partners to co-design and implement this new ADAPT platform. We will provide practical support from our teams in over 17 African countries and keep bringing in the best of global technology and finance, to ensure Africa’s single digital market is African in its roots and global in its reach.”
ADAPT will support the AfCFTA in achieving its objectives through three interconnected layers of infrastructure: identity, data, and finance.
- Trusted Digital Identity: Businesses and governments will gain secure, self-sovereign digital identities using decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, seamlessly integrated with national ID systems like Kenya’s eCitizen and Nigeria’s NIMC.
- Cross-Border Data Exchange: The initiative will create a unified source of truth for trade documents and logistics information. Leveraging smart contracts, AI-driven compliance, and IoT-enabled cargo tracking, ADAPT aims to cut border clearance times by more than half.
- Interoperable Finance Layer: By linking mobile money, banks, stablecoins such as USDT, and other digital currencies into a single network, ADAPT will streamline payments, reduce clearance times, and lower transaction costs.
“This will be a long and challenging road, but thanks to the commitment of the AfCFTA and the dedication of our partners, I am convinced that we will realize this mission to connect Africa through the most modern digital trade infrastructure in the world,” commented Schiener.
