Financing Africa’s just transition with reparations distributed through the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement

This is a chapter in the book ‘A Research Agenda for Law, Finance and the Environment’ published by Edward Elgar on 24 February 2026, and is available here. The abstract is below.

Africa is advancing its sustainable development objectives through the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA). However, sufficient external capital is required to transform the AfCFTA’s goal of anticipated economic growth into one that also facilitates a net zero transition with justice at its heart. Little attention has been given to mechanisms that can concomitantly repair the harm inflicted on Africa by the devastating combination of the climate crisis, the Trans-Atlantic Trade in Africans, colonialism, and neo-colonialism. This chapter aims to bridge that gap by using the dual epistemic lens of Pan-Africanism and Afrocentricity to speculatively make the case that the AfCFTA is an ideal vehicle for the collection and distribution of potential financial reparations that could be deployed to finance a just transition in Africa. In so doing, this chapter argues that the AfCFTA is capable of distributing reparations in a climate-compatible way due to its positioning as a trade agreement that strives to lift Africans out of poverty and to chart a sustainable development pathway for the continent.