Five Billion Dollars Will Not Fix It
The Africa–CARICOM partnership has money and political will. What it does not have is a container ship.
The commitments are real, and they are growing. Afreximbank raised its Caribbean financing ceiling from three billion dollars to five billion at the fiftieth CARICOM Heads of Government meeting in Saint Kitts and Nevis this February. A Caribbean Trade Centre is planned for Bridgetown. A Caribbean Export-Import Bank has been proposed, a CARICOM Payment and Settlement System is in development, and the AfriCaribbean Trade and Investment Forum returns to the region this year. The African Union and CARICOM have signed a memorandum of understanding, launched a joint health partnership, and convened their reparations mechanisms for the first time.
Anyone assessing this relationship on the basis of institutional commitment would conclude that it is in good health. The trade figures do not agree, and the reason is worth understanding precisely, because it determines whether the next five billion dollars accomplishes more than the last three.
What the numbers actually show
An International Monetary Fund working paper published this year, Mind the Gaps: Caribbean Trade Patterns and the Connectivity Constraint, examined why Caribbean trade concentrates so heavily in so few directions. Its central finding is that CARICOM countries trade approximately two and a half billion dollars a year less with distant partners than economic fundamentals would predict — a shortfall equal to roughly ten per cent of their trade with non-regional partners.
The explanation is not preference, and it is not policy. It is physical.
Caribbean states face among the highest shipping costs in the world. The paper documents rates in Antigua and Barbuda running near three times the global average. Shipping connectivity to CARICOM destinations is measurably lower than to comparable regions even after controlling for distance, and the region depends on a hub-and-spoke structure that routes cargo through transshipment points in Jamaica, The Bahamas and Antigua.
The consequence for Africa–Caribbean trade is straightforward. There is no meaningful direct maritime service between West Africa and the Caribbean. Goods move via Europe or North America, absorbing time and cost at each transfer, and a cargo that must travel north before it can travel west is not a cargo that competes on price.
Air connectivity constrains the other half of the relationship. The same paper finds that a ten per cent increase in flight capacity is associated with a five to six per cent increase in tourist arrivals, and that roughly sixty per cent of CARICOM arrivals originate in the United States alone. Diversifying that dependency is a resilience objective as much as a commercial one — and it cannot be achieved without aircraft in the sky between the two regions.
The finding that should change the conversation
Here is the part of the IMF paper that deserves more attention than it has received. The authors tested financial connectivity alongside physical connectivity, and found its effect muted. The banking-to-trade elasticity for CARICOM comes in roughly seventy-five per cent below the global average. Correspondent banking relationships, in other words, are not what is holding this trade back.
Physical constraints bind. Financial ones, at current margins, do not.
That conclusion sits uncomfortably beside the shape of the current partnership, which is overwhelmingly financial in character. A larger financing ceiling, a new development bank, a payments and settlement system, a trade centre — these are instruments for deploying capital and reducing transaction friction. They are useful. They are also aimed at a constraint that the best available evidence says is not the binding one.
The five billion dollars is necessary. The question is whether any material portion of it reaches shipping capacity and air service rather than the softer infrastructure around them. Afreximbank has stated that connectivity financing is within scope. Whether it materialises as vessels and routes, rather than as facilities and forums, is the single most informative thing to watch over the next twenty-four months.
The second constraint, which almost nobody discusses
Suppose the ships arrive. A container that lands in Bridgetown is not the same thing as a container that clears.
For goods to move between these regions at scale, conformity assessment has to travel with them. A test report, an inspection certificate, a management system certification issued in Accra or Nairobi has to be accepted by a regulator or a buyer in Georgetown or Kingston without being repeated. Where it is not accepted, the exporter pays twice — once for the original assessment and again for the destination market's — and for the small and medium enterprises this partnership repeatedly says it wants to reach, paying twice is the same as not exporting.
The institutional pieces exist on both sides. The Caribbean has CROSQ, the CARICOM Regional Organisation for Standards and Quality. Africa has ARSO, the African Organisation for Standardisation, and the African Continental Free Trade Area addresses technical barriers to trade directly in its Annex 6. Underneath both sits the international accreditation architecture, where mutual recognition arrangements are what allow one country's conformity assessment to carry weight in another's market. That machinery has been identified within the accreditation community as a cornerstone of AfCFTA trade facilitation.
What is not clear — and it is a question worth putting directly to both secretariats — is whether any deliberate pathway connects the Caribbean quality infrastructure to the African one. Not shared membership in global bodies, which is common, but a specific, operational recognition route for a Caribbean exporter selling into an African market, or the reverse.
If that pathway does not exist, then a direct shipping route delivers goods into a market that is not yet prepared to accept their paperwork. This is unglamorous work. It generates no communiqués. It is also the difference between a trade corridor that functions and one that is announced.
What progress would look like
The value of stating the constraints plainly is that it produces indicators that can be checked, rather than aspirations that can only be restated. Over the next two years, four things would constitute real movement.
A scheduled maritime service operating between West Africa and the Caribbean, whatever its frequency. Not a memorandum contemplating one — a published schedule.
Direct air service, or a codeshare arrangement that removes a transatlantic double-crossing from the itinerary.
A conformity assessment pathway between CROSQ and the African standards and accreditation bodies, with a documented recognition route an exporter can actually use.
Disclosed deployment of the Afreximbank facility by sector, so that the proportion reaching physical connectivity is visible rather than inferred.
None of these require new political commitments. All four have already been promised in general terms. What has been missing is the specificity that makes a promise checkable — and the willingness, on the part of those of us writing about this relationship, to keep a list.
This site maintains a running tracker of Africa–CARICOM commitments and their delivery status. Sources for this piece are listed in Resources. Nothing here is investment advice.