Trade Briefs
Profiling the African Agricultural Value Chain: Basic and Gender Dimensions

The AfCFTA Secretariat, in a recent report entitled The Futures Report 2021: Which Value Chains for a Made in Africa Revolution, identified certain industrial sectors and sub-sectors as potential candidates for value chain development under the AfCFTA agreement. The broad sectors included in their list were agricultural/agro-processing, textiles and leather, automotive, pharmaceuticals, mobile financial services and cultural industries.
This Trade Brief looks at the broadly-defined agricultural/agro-processing/agri-business sector in Africa[1], from the perspective of the regional and global value chain dimensions. The intention is to present the basic value chain metrics of the sector, including gender-disaggregated employment metrics, as a precursor to several more extensive studies forthcoming from tralac over the next few months.
[1] Due to differences in aggregating sectoral industrial data, the sector has been defined as ‘the broadly-defined agricultural/agro-processing/agri-business sector’. The aggregate contains data for agricultural production; agri-business production, defined as ‘economic activities derived from or connected to farm products’ (BBVA, 2022) and agro-processing, defined as ‘the sub-sector of the manufacturing that beneficiates primary materials and intermediate goods from agricultural, fisheries and forestry based sectors’ (DTIC, 2022).
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