Africa has increasingly become a transit and destination region for cocaine trafficking and use.
Cocaine seizures in Africa have increased over 20-fold between 2015 and 2024 and an increasing number of seizures implicate African countries as transit or destination. In 2023, seizures en route to Africa were 278 per cent higher than in 2015 – with the largest increase in this respect recorded for North Africa and West and Central Africa.
Africa is increasingly used as a transit point for cocaine trafficking, with countries in the region more frequently identified as a departure point in global seizures over the past five years.
Partial data suggest that, in some subregions in Africa it may be that cocaine trafficking is more pronounced than seizures in these subregions may suggest. In particular, in East Africa, North Africa and, more recently, Southern Africa, the available records of individual seizures suggest that larger quantities of cocaine were made en route to these subregions than in the subregions themselves.
The number of people who are in treatment in Africa for cocaine as their main drug of use suggests that there is some intensive use of the substance in the region.
The presence of use, in the region, of "crack" cocaine, which is typically associated with more intensive harms, is clear from drug-related treatment data: among less than a quarter reported cases of treatment with cocaine as the primary drug between 2020 and 2024 with known type of cocaine, over 70% of cases used primarily "crack" cocaine.
