For twenty five years the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a policy that allows African nations export goods duty-free to the US, was treated in Washington as a quiet act of goodwill. But under the new White House tsar, that era is over.
Donald Trump’s second term has turned trade policy into a lever of leverage, and Africa, a continent that ships mostly raw and lightly processed goods, has felt the squeeze first and hardest.
The question now facing the region’s finance ministries is not whether AGOA will keep some form of life, since it has been extended for another year, but whether that life is worth much under a president who prefers deals to preferences.
On July 25th a fresh round of tariffs, between 10 and 12.5 percent, came into force against 60 trading partners that Washington accused of failing to police forced labour in their supply chains. Nigeria, South Africa, Egypt, Morocco, Algeria and Angola were all on the list, taxed at the full 12.5 percent rate even though most of them remain nominally covered by AGOA.
The overlap is telling. A country can hold AGOA eligibility and still be taxed under an entirely separate statute.
Tariffs on emerging markets bite hardest of all
Mr Trump’s tariff architecture was never designed with poor exporters in mind. For emerging markets forced to adjust almost overnight, the effect of the waves of tariff has been proportionally larger than for wealthier trading partners who can absorb costs or negotiate carve outs.
South Africa is the clearest case. A 30 percent tariff imposed in August 2025 wiped out much of the advantage that AGOA had given its exporters. Vehicle shipments to America collapsed by nearly three quarters over the year, and the country’s trade ministry has warned that tens of thousands of jobs in the citrus and metals sectors remain exposed.
South Africa’s exports to the United States have slid even as manufacturers scrambled to find buyers elsewhere.
On its part, Ivory Coast, the source of nearly two fifths of the world’s cocoa, was handed a 21 percent duty of its own, prompting officials in Abidjan to threaten higher export taxes that would push up cocoa costs for chocolate makers everywhere.
Across the continent AGOA linked exports fell by roughly a third in the year to November 2025, according to the Trade Law Centre in South Africa, a decline concentrated in precisely the labour intensive apparel and auto sectors the programme was meant to nurture.
The role of AGOA, now redefined
What AGOA offered was never really a trade deal. It was a unilateral gift, renewable at Congress’s discretion and dependent on countries meeting loose governance benchmarks.
Mr Trump has made clear he wants something closer to reciprocity. When he finally signed a reauthorisation on February 3rd, after a lapse of four months, it ran for only one year rather than the decade long renewals of the past, and it came with a warning from the administration that the programme would be modernised to serve American interests as much as African ones.
The trade representative’s office has signalled it wants African states to open their own markets wider to American goods in return for continued duty free access, a demand that inverts the logic AGOA was built on.
Analysts preparing for Africa’s version of a Trump shaped AGOA describe a programme drifting from development tool toward negotiating chip. Cotton has become an unlikely test case. Proposals to expand duty free cotton exports are being pitched in Washington as a possible sweetener that could either rescue or poison the wider deal, depending on how it interacts with separate tariff lines.
South Africa’s own status remains unresolved, caught between diplomatic friction with Pretoria and Washington’s stated wish to keep the programme narrower and more transactional than before.
Africa searches for a market beyond Washington
Meanwhile, if the message from Washington is that African economies can no longer count on preferential access, the response taking shape across the continent is diversification.
On their part, several governments on the continent are leaning harder on the African Continental Free Trade Area, hoping that deeper intra African commerce can cushion the loss of American demand.
For instance, exporters in South Africa are courting buyers in the Gulf, in Asia and in Europe, while Ivorian officials talk openly of shifting cocoa flows toward the European Union if American tariffs make that market unworkable.
There is also a broader geopolitical backdrop. China’s expanding footprint in African trade offers an alternative source of investment and demand, one that does not come bundled with the sort of conditionality Washington now attaches to its own preferences.
None of these alternatives can fully replace a market of America’s size on short notice.
The United States still buys tens of billions of dollars in African goods each year, and AGOA, however diminished, remains the only channel offering broad duty free treatment for apparel and manufactured goods.
What has changed is the assumption that Washington’s goodwill is permanent. African trade officials increasingly plan as though it is not, treating the one year extension less as a reprieve than as a countdown clock.
Whether AGOA survives in any recognisable form past 2026 depends less on its economic merits, which have been well documented, than on how much reciprocity Mr Trump’s negotiators ultimately demand and how many African governments are willing, or able, to pay it.
