Minister Nacanabo,
I write to you not as a secretariat, but as a colleague — one of fifty-four ministers who signs the same painful cheque every year. Africa buys USD 709 bn of goods annually, and USD 620 bn of it leaves this continent. Some of that money is yours, some of it is mine, and almost none of it needs to go where it goes.
What is fixed — and what is yours to change
Two kinds of statement sit in this document, and they carry different weight. The continental spine is fixed: USD 709 bn of total imports; USD 620 bn sourced off-continent; approximately USD 89 bn traded within Africa; USD 136.75 bn of measured government procurement inside an estimated USD 207 bn that our governments influence. Those figures are measured, reconciled and not on the table. Everything else — the product bundle proposed for Burkina Faso — is Draft 1: a first pass drawn from your country’s productive-capacity audit, printed precisely so that you can correct it.
Why Burkina Faso is in this room
Burkina Faso's strongest endowment for continental supply is shea, not gold. The country is the world's third-largest shea-nut producer (FAOSTAT 2023, behind Nigeria and Mali) and is most commonly cited as the world's largest exporter, at roughly 50% of global nut exports, resting on the shea parkland belt and on decades of institutional coordination through women's cooperatives, the Global Shea Alliance and fair-trade buyers such as L'Occitane and AAK — a women-led cluster of at least 646,000 collecting households across 1,069 registered groups. These are durable, hard-to-replicate organisational assets. The honest constraint is that the beneficiation stage today reaches only intermediate crude and refined butter; cosmetic-grade and fractionated product is the audit's next step, not a present capability, and it depends on investment in cosmetic-grade refining and fractionation, HACCP and quality systems, certification to buyer specifications at scale, and aggregation and traceability for consistent volume. Behind that sits energy: roughly 366 MW installed with more than half of consumption imported is the binding gate on any processing scale-up, and unreliable, expensive power raising costs above offshore refiners is the named threat to the whole position.
The instrument — two layers, both required
Pre-allocation. The African Union pre-allocates 25-year supply rights per product category to designated African producers. That is the fairness layer — the reason every member state, including those still rebuilding, holds a bundle at all.
Match-or-Release. When any of our governments procures, the designated continental supplier is shown the open-market quote and must match it on price, quality, warranty and service in a single window — or release the buyer instantly, no penalty, no delay. I have called it the Cell Phone Test: nobody in this room is asked to buy a worse phone. This is a right to match, never a right to exclude. Your procurement autonomy is untouched, and there is no pooled purchasing, no central buyer, no buyers’ club.
What I ask of you
One hour, and your pen. Mark what is wrong: the lines that do not belong to Burkina Faso, the capability this draft understates, the buyer it misreads. The response instrument at the end of this document takes a minute to complete, and Draft 2 will show, line by line, which member state asked for each change. Your correction is not an objection to the method — it is the method.