Africa did not start this war. Yet since 28 February 2026, the continent has absorbed its consequences more acutely than almost any other region on earth.
Oil prices have surged. Fertiliser supplies have been severed at precisely the moment farmers need them. Currencies are falling. And governments that have spent years managing one crisis after another are discovering, once again, that they have limited room to manoeuvre.
This is the predictable consequence of a structural dependency that African leaders, international institutions, and development partners have acknowledged for decades without resolving.
Africa imports too much of the fuel that powers its economies and the fertiliser that feeds its people, from regions and actors over which it has no influence and little leverage.
Covid-19, Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine, the US tariff policies and aid cuts all tell the same story: decisions made outside the continent have a disproportionate impact on the well-being of its 1.4 billion people. The Iran war is simply the latest demonstration of that reality.
With 80% of African countries being net oil importers, the vulnerability to energy price disruptions is systemic. A month after the conflict erupted, nine African countries had reported increases in gasoline pump prices averaging 10.9%. For most African households, energy prices do not exist in isolation. Transport costs account for 30 to 50% of final costs in domestic food markets across the continent, meaning oil price shocks transmit directly into higher food prices over subsequent quarters.
The humanitarian and stability risks are not theoretical. Higher fuel prices translate directly into higher transport costs, which push up the cost of living and can trigger social unrest, cause security gaps, and foment extremism, especially in countries already facing fragility.
The fertiliser shock may prove even more damaging. Five of the ten biggest importers of fertilisers from the Persian Gulf were African: Sudan, Tanzania, Somalia, Kenya, and Mozambique. When the price of urea increases by 35% in under a month the knock on effects are significant.
The timing is particularly inauspicious. The planting season across much of Africa runs from March to May, meaning an extended disruption to trade through the Strait could significantly affect ammonia and urea fertiliser production and availability just as farmers need it most.
The AfDB projected that in 2026 a number of countries including Ethiopia, Egypt and Nigeria would record double-digit inflation. The conflict has now added sustained upward pressure on top of those figures, while 31 African currencies have weakened against the dollar since the onset of hostilities, increasing the local-currency cost of imported food, fuel and fertiliser and driving up debt servicing costs.
In response, Morocco has suspended customs duties and VAT on oil imports to stabilise prices. Kenya has established a government-to-government fuel procurement framework. South Africa and Namibia have temporarily limited fuel price increases by reducing the general fuel levy.
But nearly half of the continent’s countries have assumed the crisis will fade and have either limited themselves to symbolic measures or stayed on the sidelines. Another third of governments, are attempting to shield the public by subsidising food and energy on the assumption that national treasuries can absorb the costs.
The reason so few governments have the space to act more boldly is debt. Successive shocks since 2020 have progressively eroded fiscal buffers and driven up the cost of external borrowing by 91%.
There is no single instrument that resolves this, but there is a sequenced response that could meaningfully contain the damage.
In the immediate term, the G20 should reactivate the Debt Service Suspension Initiative. During Covid-19, the original DSSI unlocked $12.9bn in fiscal space for the most constrained economies, providing critical breathing room when it was most needed. A targeted reactivation, focused on the most exposed countries would allow governments to redirect resources toward food and fuel support without triggering disorderly debt dynamics.
Simultaneously, the IMF should deploy its existing crisis instruments in full. The Catastrophe Containment and Relief Trust was designed precisely for situations where a global shock hits multiple low-income countries at once, and the Fund’s Food Shock Window is directly applicable to the fertiliser and food price dimensions of the current crisis.
But crisis instruments buy time, not structural change.
The deeper lesson is that Africa’s exposure to external energy and fertiliser markets is the result of decades of underinvestment in regional production capacity.
Africa can continue to absorb these shocks and spend years recovering, or it can take decisive steps to reduce dependence on external supply chains.
The signs of a more ambitious response are beginning to emerge.
Nigeria’s Aliko Dangote has already built an oil refinery in Nigeria currently operating beyond 650,000 barrels per day with plans to expand to 1.4 million barrels by 2028-2030. He has pledged to lead construction of another plant in East Africa with Tanga in Tanzania and Mombasa in Kenya both under consideration, to be fed by crude from DR Congo, Kenya, South Sudan and Uganda.
A scaling up of investment in renewables is already underway; nearly 90% of Kenya’s electricity generation comes from renewables. The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, was inaugurated in September 2025, more than doubling Ethiopia’s electricity output and positioning the country as a potential regional energy exporter.
In 2024, African heads of state committed to tripling domestic fertiliser production by 2034. Mission 300, a partnership between the African Development Bank and the World Bank, has developed country investment plans to provide modern energy access to 300 million people.
These initiatives need a scale up of investment. Yet Africa accounts for only 2% of clean energy investment despite having 20% of the world population, 60% of the world’s best solar resources, and wind power generation over 70 times current generation levels.
A structural driver of this lack of investment is the high cost of capital, combined with outdated perceptions about the investment potential of one of the world’s fastest growing regions. This is where action by the G20 could work to reduce regulatory, data and governance barriers allowing more investment to flow.
The New African Financial Architecture for Development (NAFAD) is an initiative led by AfDB President Dr Sidi Ould Tah to overcome structural obstacles to mobilising resources at scale, designed to plug Africa’s $400bn annual development finance gap aby unlocking Africa’s domestic savings estimated to be in the region of $4 trillion.
The question is whether this crisis will finally be the forcing function that turns long-standing commitments to reduce Africa’s structural dependence into funded, implemented programmes, or whether the continent will once again absorb the shock, recover slowly, and wait for the next one.
David McNair is executive director at The ONE Campaign.
Ndidi Okonkwo Nwuneli is co-founder of Sahel Consulting Agriculture and Nutrition and co-founder of Aace Foods.