By Carol Weaving, RX Africa Managing Director
When discussions turn to Africa’s small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the conversation almost always lands on the same subject: funding. Access to finance is a persistent problem but treating it as the defining obstacle misses something bigger. Most businesses aren’t held back by capital alone. They’re held back by a lack of access to buyers, to distribution networks, to strategic partners, and to the international markets where real growth occurs.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is gradually changing the trading environment, but opening borders doesn’t automatically connect businesses with the opportunities on the other side. The question is no longer whether opportunity exists, but how we can get more businesses in front of it.
Part of the answer lies in live exhibitions and trade shows. At RX, we run over 400 recurring events across 43 sectors in 22 countries, giving us a rare perspective on how businesses succeed in the right environment. What we’re also seeing consistently is how exhibitions are evolving from marketing platforms into one of the most effective and practical tools available for accelerating SME growth at scale.
Closing the access gap
For decades, exhibitions were regarded primarily as brand-building exercises. Useful for visibility, but peripheral to serious commercial strategy. That perception no longer holds, and the numbers from our own portfolio make the case: 70% of RX exhibitors are SMEs arriving to engage directly with decision-makers, test new markets, and accelerate relationships that might otherwise take years to build through conventional channels.
Zooming out, UFI’s 2026 Global Exhibition Industry Statistics confirms Africa’s exhibition industry attracts around 2.1 million visitors and 45,000 exhibiting companies annually, generating an estimated €1.3 billion (approximately US$1.5 billion) in economic output and supporting more than 21,000 jobs across the continent. Those figures speak to the industry’s scale, but they don’t fully capture what happens in the spaces between stands, in the scheduled meetings and corridor conversations where commercial relationships are actually forged.
The value of a single well-placed conversation should not be underestimated. A brief exchange between a supplier and a regional distributor can open the door to an agreement, an export contract, or an investment relationship that changes a business’s trajectory entirely. For an entrepreneur who has exhausted local demand, that is not just useful, it’s transformational.
Funding alone isn’t enough
This dynamic is especially significant in Africa, where access challenges run deeper than balance sheets. The informal sector accounts for nearly 40% of the continent’s GDP, according to the African Development Bank’s African Economic Outlook 2026. Many of these businesses will never access traditional funding channels, but they can still benefit enormously from direct exposure to customers, buyers, and commercial networks, and that is precisely the gap trade events are positioned to help close.
Funding gaps are vast and well-documented, which is precisely why access infrastructure matters so much. The global shortfall for formal SMEs stands at US$5.7 trillion, according to the Alliance for Financial Inclusion. Africa’s share is estimated at approximately US$331 billion. In South Africa, a market with a relatively sophisticated financial system and strong levels of private sector credit, the gap is believed to sit between R350 billion and R386 billion.
These numbers are often treated as the whole story. But they only tell half of it. Even where financing gaps close, a business with no route to buyers, distributors or export markets still won’t grow. Capital without customers is inert. Growth rarely happens in isolation. It happens at the point of connection, and that is the piece the finance conversation consistently leaves out.
Supporting Africa’s growth agenda
Across Nigeria, Kenya, and South Africa alone, there are an estimated 52 million SMEs contributing up to 50% of national GDPs and employing as much as 93% of the workforce in some markets. These businesses are the backbone of African economies, driving innovation, creating jobs, and supporting local communities. Yet many continue to struggle to scale.
Africa’s entrepreneurs are not lacking in talent or determination. What many lack is the infrastructure of opportunity – the channels, networks, and platforms that connect potential to growth.
Exhibitions are not a panacea, and we don’t position them as one. They do not replace the need for better financing mechanisms, improved infrastructure, or more enabling policy environments. But they offer the ability to bring entire business ecosystems into a single space, at a single moment, at scale, which is something no funding programme or regulatory reform can fully replicate.
The trade show floor has always been where business relationships begin. Increasingly across Africa, it is also where the continent’s SMEs are finding their next customer, their first export order, and their path to growth.