Colombia and Ghana Agreed a Direct Shipping Lane

One number should keep the ambition honest. The 33 economies of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States together send Africa about 0.3% of global trade, on the WTO's reckoning, and the flow in the other direction is smaller still. Against a figure that small, the temptation is to reach for the grand gesture, and in March the region duly staged one: the first ministerial-level CELAC-Africa forum, in Bogotá, bringing CELAC's members together with delegates from 19 African states around the language of South-South solidarity. The forum was real and useful. It was also, on its own, the cheapest part of the whole enterprise.

History is the reason to be wary of the photograph. Latin America and Africa have convened before, at the Africa-South America summits of 2006 in Abuja, then 2009 and 2013, each opening with the same complementarity and the same goodwill, and each failing to carry the momentum past the closing statement. A communiqué is not a market, and a declaration of partnership creates no orders. What matters about the Bogotá forum is what was signed underneath the speeches that an exporter can use.

Colombia's answer is a working example of an agency building demand rather than announcing it. Bogota is the only capital in the region with a formal, dated Africa Strategy, running 2022 to 2026, and it has put programming behind the paper. ProColombia's Ella Exporta a Africa has walked more than a hundred women-led companies into African markets, the unglamorous cohort-by-cohort work of turning a first-time exporter into a repeat one. Colombia's non-mining, non-energy exports to Africa reached $296.5 million in 2025, up 112% on the year, on Colombian trade ministry figures reported by Finance Colombia, carried by coffee, bananas, machinery, paper, and apparel. That last detail matters more than the growth rate. A country better known for selling Africa hydrocarbons is now selling it processed goods and light manufactures, which is the diversification every commodity exporter says it wants and few actually book.

The piece that separates this attempt from the summits that faded is a route. At the forum, Colombia and Ghana agreed to open a direct maritime line between Cartagena and Tema, bypassing the European and North American hubs through which South Atlantic cargo has long been forced to transship. Transshipment is a tax on distance paid in days and dollars, and it falls hardest on the perishable and lighter-margin goods, the coffee, the fruit, the consumer products, that a diversifying exporter is trying to move. A direct lane rewrites the cost model in a way no ministerial declaration can.

What would make it stick is institutionalization and demand. The pull is there. Africa is a net food importer whose population is heading toward 2.5 billion by 2050, and the Development Bank of Latin America and the African Union have just published their first joint report, which reads like a business plan for a relationship left too long on the shelf. The private sector is moving ahead of the treaties, through bodies like the Latin African Chamber of Commerce. South-South trade has more than doubled since 2007, to roughly $5.6 trillion in 2023. The risk is the old one, that the agenda rides on the political will of one administration and lapses with it. The fix is to embed it in standing institutions, calendars, and budgets, which is what a proposed heads-of-state CELAC-Africa summit in Addis Ababa next year is meant to begin.

For practitioners with no stake in either region, the export lesson generalizes cleanly. Building a market from near zero is a sequence. Read the counterpart's structural gap and sell into it: a net food importer wants agri-food and light manufacturing. Fund the on-ramp, the cohorts and the first-container financing, because that is where first-time exporters convert. And spend disproportionately on the logistics artery, because a corridor that removes a fortnight and a transshipment fee does more for your exporters than a year of delegations.