The Trump administration’s “America First” doctrine was not ambiguous about its priorities. Africa was not among them. Yet in 2018, the White House unveiled Prosper Africa. This initiative promised to double U.S. trade and investment with the continent by aligning the resources of more than a dozen federal agencies behind deals that benefited American companies and African partners alike. The name was aspirational. The architecture was not.
Prosper Africa arrived in the wake of a strategic vacuum. China had overtaken the United States as Africa’s largest trading partner by 2009, and Beijing’s infrastructure-led engagement- roads, railways, ports, power stations- had generated the kind of continental visibility that American commerce, operating through private sector channels without coordinated state backing, had failed to match. The Belt and Road Initiative, formalised in 2013, gave China’s engagement with Africa narrative coherence that AGOA, the African Growth and Opportunity Act, Washington’s primary trade instrument since 2000, had never matched in either scale or strategic legibility.
What Prosper Africa offered in response was coordination. The U.S. Trade and Development Agency, the Export-Import Bank, the Overseas Private Investment Corporation (subsequently restructured as the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation), USAID, and Commerce Department trade representatives were all notionally aligned behind a single deal-making mandate. The practical result was a series of trade missions, investment roundtables, and announcement ceremonies. Between 2019 and 2021, the initiative claimed to have facilitated deals worth approximately fifty billion dollars across sub-Saharan Africa. Verification of that figure and of the proportion represented by new investment versus deals already in the pipeline was difficult to establish.
The structural problem with Prosper Africa was not corruption or incompetence; it was conceptual. Its operating logic assumed that what separated American companies from African markets was primarily information asymmetry and bureaucratic friction. If the agencies were aligned and friction reduced, commerce would flow. That assumption overlooked the more fundamental obstacle: American private capital does not regard most African markets as offering risk-adjusted returns that are competitive with other emerging-market opportunities. No amount of inter-agency coordination changes that calculus. What changes it is long-term concessional financing, political risk guarantees at scale, and infrastructure investment that creates the markets American companies would then serve. Prosper Africa offered coordination. China offered concrete.
The AGOA framework through which much of U.S.-Africa trade formally flows added its own structural constraints. Preferential access to U.S. markets was conditioned on good governance benchmarks and maintained unilaterally by Washington, meaning African countries could be, and periodically were, suspended without recourse. Ethiopia was partially suspended in 2022 under the Biden administration following human rights concerns related to the Tigray conflict. The suspension removed preferential access for Ethiopian textile manufacturers, immediately affecting hundreds of thousands of workers employed in factories that had specifically organised around AGOA-dependent production. The conditionality structure, from an African vantage point, looked less like a partnership and more like a unilateral instrument of leverage.
Trump’s broader diplomatic posture toward Africa undermined whatever Prosper Africa’s technical design might have accomplished. The reduction of USAID programming, the imposition of blanket travel restrictions that initially included several Muslim-majority African nations, and a series of reported private remarks dismissive of African countries damaged the relational capital that trade relationships require. Commerce follows confidence. Confidence follows respect. The gap between the initiative’s language and the administration’s conduct was observable from Addis Ababa to Accra.
By contrast, China’s engagement during the same period deepened through the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation. This triennial summit mechanism combined debt financing, technical assistance, and political symbolism in a package African governments found easier to navigate than Washington’s conditionality-heavy alternatives. The 2018 FOCAC summit in Beijing committed $60 billion in new financing. The sums were disputed, and the debt terms scrutinised, but the signal was unambiguous: China was treating Africa as a strategic priority. The United States, despite Prosper Africa’s claims, treated it as a secondary market with a public-relations problem.
The Biden administration’s subsequent Lobito Corridor project, a $55 billion infrastructure initiative for sub-Saharan Africa announced in 2022 and given concrete form through a railway linking Angola’s Atlantic coast to the copper belt of the DRC and Zambia, represented a belated acknowledgement that competition with China required the same infrastructure logic, not just a better marketing strategy. That it came three years after Prosper Africa’s launch was an admission, in all but words, that the Trump approach had not moved the needle.
For African governments, the lesson embedded in the Prosper Africa episode is not that the United States is an unreliable partner; American companies remain major investors in sectors from oil to mobile telecommunications, but that partnership requires mutual commitment and structural consistency, not initiative-branding tied to electoral cycles. A continent managing the largest youth bulge in human history, navigating climate adaptation, and asserting greater agency in global trade negotiations needs trading relationships that outlast any single administration. The question for Washington is whether it is prepared to offer that. The question for African capitals is whether they are prepared to insist on it.
