Vice President Professor Jane Naana Opoku-Agyemang Wednesday announced Ghana’s readiness to pilot a continental digital trade framework aimed at boosting cross-border digital transactions and driving sustainable development across Africa.

She explained that the initiative, aligned with the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), would strengthen Africa’s digital sovereignty while enabling scalable and integrated systems for trade across the continent.

The Vice President made the announcement at the opening of the 2026 3i Africa Summit in Accra, attended by central bank governors, finance and trade ministers, technology leaders, and development partners.

“Ghana will work with Rwanda, Zambia and other partners to pilot a continental digital trade corridor,” she said, stressing that the systems Africa built today would shape its role in the global digital economy.

The pilot, she noted, would be implemented, tested and evaluated, with a focus on mobile money interoperability, mutual recognition frameworks, cross-border digital identity and Know Your Customer (KYC) protocols, as well as harmonised electronic invoicing.

Vice President Opoku-Agyemang said the framework would be integrated into the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) and supported by a regulatory sandbox that allowed AfCFTA member states to participate without requiring a full legislative overhaul.

She outlined four key pillars underpinning the trade corridor: payments, identity, regulation and infrastructure, each designed to address longstanding structural barriers to intra-African trade.

The Vice President emphasised that while political independence had been achieved across much of Africa, true independence remained incomplete without economic sovereignty.

“Economic sovereignty in the twenty-first century is inseparable from digital sovereignty,” she stated.

Prof Opoku-Agyemang highlighted the role of Ghana’s national identification system, noting that the Ghana Card had increasingly been integrated into financial and public services, providing a strong foundation for cross-border KYC systems and digital trade expansion.

On regulation, she called for harmonised and interoperable standards to ensure that goods certified in one country could be readily accepted in others, including Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya and Senegal.

The Vice President urged African countries to commit to the digital trade agenda with discipline, warning that fragmented regulatory systems increased the cost of doing business and disproportionately affected small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), which form the backbone of trade on the continent.

She encouraged stakeholders to harness Africa’s youthful population to accelerate technology adoption and drive the next phase of global digital growth.

“Whether this becomes a true continental transformation will depend on the political will, private investment and institutional discipline that countries bring to the table,” she added.