Canada has a strategy for Africa, now it’s time to deliver
Prime Minister Mark Carney has spent his first year circling the globe in search of trade. India. Japan. Australia. China. France. Qatar. The message has been: Canada must diversify, reduce its dependence on the United States, and build new partnerships to withstand geopolitical volatility.
Sound instinct. But there is a continent-sized opportunity that Canada keeps looking past.
Last month, Mennonite Economic Development Associates and the African Impact Initiative co-hosted the Canada-Africa Innovation Festival (CAIF) during Toronto Tech Week. More than a hundred leaders—diaspora entrepreneurs, investors, development finance professionals, academics, trade and development gurus, civil society, and policy experts—gathered at the University of Toronto’s Schwartz Reisman Innovation Campus. They held a programmatic session on Canada’s Africa Strategy, designed to deliver concrete, community-authored policy recommendations from the people already deeply embedded in the relationship.
What emerged was inspiring. And so was what happened just prior. Secretary of State for International Development Randeep Sarai had just visited Nigeria, announcing more than $30-million in funding and promoting the Canada-Africa Business Conference in Lagos as a cornerstone of our economic engagement with Africa. Before that, he had been in Kenya. The commitment is clear. And yet, a gap between signal and execution remains the defining tension in the relationship.
Canada’s Africa Strategy debuted in March 2025—an ambitious framework for engagement. It promised the diaspora new paths. It shifts development assistance to commercial partnerships. Fifteen months later, the Senate Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Trade said it plainly: no dedicated new funding, no implementation plan, not one word in the budget. The diaspora mechanism lacks a base. Meanwhile, Canada’s merchandise trade with Africa is $15.1-billion, less than 1.1 per cent of our total trade with a partner that controls 30 per cent of the world’s critical minerals and hosts the world’s largest free trade area by nation participants.
The challenge is infrastructure, not intent.
The entrepreneurs at CAIF showed what is happening despite the absence. Ngutor John Ikpaahindi built Giddaa Inc., a digital real estate marketplace letting diaspora Nigerians buy, lease, and invest in property across Africa’s largest economy. Part Realtor.ca, part Airbnb, it solves a problem for a community that has capital and lacks easy access. Ibukun Elebute’s CELLECT Laboratories invented a women’s healthtech option, providing an alternative to invasive gynecological testing and lowering cultural barriers that keep millions of patients from early cancer and HPV screening. Globally competitive innovations built by Canadians, designed for African markets, and created by communities doing the bridgework for years without formal recognition.
More than 1.3 million Canadians have African origins. They carry market knowledge, trust networks, and bilateral links no trade mission can replicate. The diaspora can be the best infrastructure. And right now, Canada needs to employ them strategically.
Specifically, Export Development Canada conducted $1.4-billion in African business in 2023, roughly one per cent of its global portfolio. The strategy's promised engagement mechanism has no governance structure, no funding, and no designated home. Canada’s blended finance tools are designed for institutional players, out of reach for the entrepreneurs and women-led businesses its strategy prioritizes for inclusive growth. The Africa Trade Hub exists, but remains largely inaccessible to the mid-size companies and diaspora operators closest to the markets it is meant to unlock.
The urgency is strategic, not only developmental. The G20 in Johannesburg last year was the first ever held in Africa. China’s 2025 trade with Africa reached US$348-billion. Canada's recent federal budget named Europe and Asia as priority markets. Africa was absent. Those governments notice that kind of omission, especially when they are actively diversifying their own trade.
Canada does have 27 diplomatic missions, 20 trade commissioner offices, and a (currently vacant) special envoy for the African Union. What it needs is greater connective tissue between the strategy and the communities that can implement it, and the financing instruments and the entrepreneurs who need investments.
That connective tissue was forming in Toronto in May, producing practical policy at a level most consultations never achieve. The question is whether Canada will build the infrastructure to make it work.
For decades, Canada asked what it can do for Africa. The question now is what Canada and Africa can build together, and whether we are serious before the window closes.
Dr. Dorothy Nyambi is president and CEO of Mennonite Economic Development Associates (MEDA), an international economic development organization that creates business solutions to poverty.
The Hill Times