RESEARCH — Jan 8, 2026
Age of Agility: Key Themes Shaping the Sub-Saharan Africa Region in 2026
By Langelihle Malimela, Alisa Strobel, Archbold Macheka, Ronel Oberholzer, Pedram Moezzi, and Chris Rogers
The global landscape in 2026 will reflect a delicate balance between resilience and adaptation amid ongoing economic uncertainties and geopolitical shifts.
As economies recalibrate their strategies in response to evolving trade dynamics and recent disruptions, sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is poised to leverage its inherent strengths. We identify three primary themes influencing strategic adjustments across the 2026 global framework. A fourth is added in this report to encompass region-specific dynamics.
Key takeaways
- The direct impact of US tariffs will remain moderate in 2026, supporting resilience. The region will remain vulnerable to indirect effects from the global tariff landscape, such as lower oil prices.
- The region’s reliance on commodities renders many states vulnerable to fluctuating global prices, particularly hydrocarbon-producing countries facing declining oil prices.
- Economic growth is forecast to be driven primarily by domestic consumption, which accounts for over 60% of GDP in many countries.
- The integration of AI technologies, alongside a shift toward public-private financing to expand access to critical minerals, is likely to play a crucial role in reshaping economic strategies and enhancing efficiency across various sectors in the region.
- Strategic debt management will be vital, especially during election cycles that previously influenced policy directions.
- The adoption of stablecoins is expected to gain traction, further integrating the region into the global financial system, but reducing monetary policy traction.
Adapting to Trade Realities
The direct impact of US tariffs will remain moderate in 2026, supporting resilience. The region will remain vulnerable to indirect effects from the global tariff landscape, such as lower oil prices, which we project as likely to worsen the trade balance as a percentage of GDP for West Africa and Southern Africa compared with 2025.
More positively, the United Kingdom, Japan and China are increasing their engagement with SSA through economic and trade mechanisms, including reduced trade barriers, infrastructure investments and efforts to finance development and production of critical minerals, a combination that is particularly likely to improve trade balances in East Africa and Central Africa.
Shaky economic foundations
We forecast sub-Saharan Africa to grow faster than the global average in 2026, indicating resilience. We expect significant divergence in performance between the region’s economies, with varying growth momentum and sustainability.
Easing price pressures in 2026 are likely to permit more sub-Saharan African economies to adopt an accommodative monetary policy stance, which will support a recovery in private consumption. Tanzania and Rwanda, which are leveraging consumption-driven growth and substantial investments in infrastructure and services, appear poised for strong economic performance in 2026.
In contrast, countries that rely more on primary commodity exports, including Angola, Ghana and Senegal, are likely to face challenges in sustaining momentum due to lower commodity prices and fiscal pressures.
Our bottom-line analysis suggests that the economic trajectory of countries in the region in 2026 will depend critically on the balance between efforts to strengthen structural resilience through broad-based, multi-sector economic growth, substantial capital investment, and adaptive policy frameworks, and the fiscal drag stemming from rising debt service obligations and fiscal consolidation efforts that will reduce growth.
Shifting asymmetric power
The growth of AI in business operations is expected to drive the development and expansion of data centers in sub-Saharan Africa in 2026. Growing digitization across various industries, particularly banking and telecoms, will make regional data centers increasingly important to ensure compliance with data privacy regulations and to improve data processing speed. Indicative of the appetite for local data centers, within 2025, a center in Johannesburg, South Africa, already had more than 90% of its capacity reserved before it was completed.
These developments will face significant hurdles related to infrastructure, particularly relating to power, water and internet supply. Data center developers may need to build on-site private power generation to minimize disruptions, thereby increasing project costs. A consistent water supply is crucial for cooling, especially in regions vulnerable to climate change and drought.
Sub-Saharan Africa’s infrastructure landscape is set for significant transformation, driven by the minerals-infrastructure nexus. The continent’s abundant reserves of critical minerals, such as cobalt and lithium, which are needed for the global energy transition, will increasingly influence the development of transport, power and logistics infrastructure. This alignment aims to improve the extraction, processing and export of high-demand minerals such as copper, cobalt, lithium and nickel.
We anticipate competition between the US, Europe and China, as well as other sources of capital, such as Japan, to develop these critical minerals. Key projects, such as the Lobito Corridor, which connects Angola to Zambia’s Copperbelt, exemplify the blueprint for future Western-backed initiatives. The US and the European Union back the project. We anticipate increased investment in similar corridors that prioritize the movement of critical minerals.
Region-specific dynamics
We forecast improving credit metrics for the region, indicated by a gradual decline in debt-to-GDP ratios. This improvement is driven by rising nominal GDP and easing interest rates. We anticipate that global interest rates will continue to stabilize, supporting access to external debt financing at acceptable cost levels.
Renewed investor interest in riskier African credits has been indicated by several weaker-rated “frontier market” economies’ ability to raise international debt between September and November. This momentum, driven by narrow spreads and falling yields, is expected to facilitate additional debt issuance by sub-Saharan Africa through 2026.
The region’s banks are expected to continue their critical role in government financing through the acquisition of debt instruments, direct lending and financing of state-owned enterprises, reinforcing the substantial sovereign-bank nexus in the region. Banks appear likely, based on their conduct to date, to continue supporting sovereign finance by buying domestic government debt through 2026, potentially crowding out lending to the real economy and thus lowering corporate-sector growth.
The global stablecoin market is poised for continued rapid growth. Africa is set to play a crucial role in this expansion, with stablecoins accounting for more than 40% of the continent’s crypto transaction volume in 2024, according to blockchain analytics firm Chainalysis.
As stablecoins gain traction in 2026, we anticipate increased risks to national monetary sovereignty and disruptions to the traditional banking sector. A greater prevalence of dual-currency financial systems is likely to weaken the transmission mechanisms of domestic monetary policy, diminishing central banks’ control over the economy’s medium of exchange. In countries reliant on local banks to finance government deficits, increased stablecoin usage and competition for bank deposits are likely to limit banks’ ability to purchase domestic sovereign debt.
—With contributions from Lerato Ntuli, Robert Matthee, Thandeka Nyathi, Derrick Botha, and Jeffery McElroy
This article was published by S&P Global Market Intelligence and not by S&P Global Ratings, which is a separately managed division of S&P Global.
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