ADAPT: Building Africa’s Digital Trade Future

IOTA Partners on a New African Initiative

TL;DR:
IOTA is partnering with the World Economic Forum, and the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change on ADAPT, a pan-African digital trade initiative led by the African Continental Free Trade Area. ADAPT connects identity, data, and finance through a digital public infrastructure to enable trusted, efficient, and inclusive trade across Africa.

Africa is on the verge of a trade transformation with the potential to reshape its economic future. 

IOTA is partnering with leading international organizations to digitize how goods, data, and payments move across the continent, unlocking tens of billions of dollars in new trade value and advancing economic inclusion.

The initiative, known as ADAPT (the AfCFTA Digital Access and Public Infrastructure for Trade Initiative) will integrate seamless payments, secure data access, and digital identities into a single digital public infrastructure - enabling African countries to trade with greater security, transparency, and efficiency. 

Once fully implemented, ADAPT has the potential to:

• Connect all African countries by 2035 to trade on a single open digital infrastructure
• Double intra-African trade by 2035, unlocking over $70 billion in additional annual trade.
• Generate $23.6 billion in annual economic gains from faster, cheaper trade.
• Cut border clearance times from up to 14 days to under 3 days.
• Reduce cross-border payment fees from 6–9% to below 3%.

To understand how ADAPT will deliver this impact, it’s important to first look at why Africa’s trade systems need a digital foundation, and how this initiative will unlock that potential.

Unlocking African Trade

With 1.5 billion people and a combined GDP of more than $3 trillion, Africa represents the largest free trade area in the world. Yet despite this scale, intra-African trade accounts for only 17% of total trade, compared to more than 60 percent in regions such as Asia and Europe.

Africa’s trade potential is hampered by structural inefficiencies. Without trusted digital identities or secure data exchange, information remains trapped in silos. Paper-based documentation slows logistics, adding hours to border clearance times. Cross-border payments can take weeks and cost up to 9% in fees, draining an estimated $25 billion each year from African economies, and the $81 billion trade-finance gap limits access to capital for small and medium-sized enterprises.

These barriers create inefficiency, delay, and mistrust across supply chains, obstacles that digital public infrastructure can finally remove. ADAPT provides the platform to do exactly that – and IOTA is proud to be a founding partner.

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 will make African trade a global benchmark for digital innovation.

“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,” says Sir Tony Blair, Founder and Executive Chairman of the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change.

What ADAPT Delivers Digitally

ADAPT will help AfCFTA deliver its goals largely through three connected layers of infrastructure: identity, data, and finance.

It will create:

• Trusted Digital Identity: Businesses and governments will gain secure, self-sovereign digital identities using decentralized identifiers and verifiable credentials, integrated with national ID systems such as Kenya’s eCitizen and Nigeria’s NIMC. 
• Cross-border Data Exchange: ADAPT will establish a single source of truth for trade documents and logistics information, supported by smart contracts, AI-driven compliance, and IoT-based cargo tracking, cutting border clearance times by more than half. 
• Interoperable Finance Layer: By connecting mobile money, banks, stablecoins such as USDT, and digital currencies into one network, ADAPT will reduce clearance times and transaction costs.

Together, these layers unlock billions in trade finance for small and medium enterprises, strengthen security and transparency, and ensure that trusted information moves as quickly as goods themselves.

As Chido Munyati, Head of Africa at the World Economic Forum, said, “ADAPT marks a major milestone in our efforts to advance free trade and economic development across Africa. Trade inefficiencies remain one of the key barriers to business growth, yet the digitalization of trade processes has the power to transform how African economies connect and collaborate.”

The Engine: Open-Source Digital Public Infrastructure 

The technological vision of ADAPT is to use a suite of emerging technologies – including the public blockchain network of IOTA – to enable interoperability across existing national systems, industry platforms, and digital services. 

As a founding partner, IOTA will contribute our technology expertise and provide the support to build and integrate ADAPT on the IOTA network. This technology transforms trade by turning every shipment, document, and transaction into verifiable digital data that can move seamlessly across borders. 

Through our experience of building TLIP in Kenya and the TWIN solution, IOTA is uniquely positioned to be a strategic partner in the ADAPT program.

By creating a unified digital public infrastructure built on a blockchain, Africa will establish a single source of truth for seamless cross-border commerce:

• Every element of the supply chain, from import/export certificates, invoices and all other trade documents, are fully digitized, authenticated and tamper-proof. Goods in transit can be more seamlessly cleared at the border, significantly increasing efficiency and reducing delays and cost.
• Tokenization of physical commodities, critical minerals and other goods will enable African businesses to get access to new trade finance solutions with better and cheaper financing terms.
• Payments using stablecoins such as USDT and other digital currencies will enable faster and cheaper settlement for cross-border trade and financing. 

This technology will give every participant access to the same trusted data, improving coordination, accountability, and confidence across the entire trade process.

The technology has already been successfully tested by public authorities and private enterprises in Kenya, Rwanda, the UK, and the Netherlands.

Implementation Rollout

ADAPT’s rollout will follow three key phases:

• 2025–2026: Pilots in three countries, including Kenya and Ghana.
• 2026 onward: Expansion to additional member states, developing legal, technical, and governance frameworks.
• 2027–2035: Continental rollout across all African countries.

Each phase invites collaboration from investors, innovators, and development partners to strengthen the foundation of Africa’s digital trade economy.

The ADAPT program has actively engaged with, and welcomes, active participation by other partners and funders. Contact [email protected] if you would like to learn more.

IOTA’s Commitment to Africa’s Digital Future

While ADAPT is a flagship partnership, it is only one part of IOTA’s broader commitment to Africa’s digital transformation. Over the next four years, we will

• Hire more than 40 specialists across Africa to strengthen IOTA and partner organizations.
• Build and scale decentralized infrastructure and develop local capacity in digital trade.
• Grow the next generation of African innovators through dedicated events, hackathons and university partnerships.
• Launch new trade finance solutions designed specifically for African markets.
• Expand work on digital payments and stablecoins, supporting wider adoption of fast, low-cost settlement across borders.

Through these initiatives, IOTA aims to serve as the underlying infrastructure powering Africa’s path to digitization and sustainable economic growth.

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.” 

For additional context, you can hear him expand on these points in the video below.

By providing a decentralized backbone for trade data, IOTA’s technology supports the goal of creating a unified market built on trust, security and openness.

Want to learn more? Tune in to our AMA with Dominik Schiener and guests on Tuesday, 16:00 CET. Share your questions on X  — either ahead of time or live during the session!