Although traceability is becoming a crucial component of global trade, its economic benefits are still not equally distributed. This study highlights a “Compliance Chasm” in which data generation expenses are borne by African producers while value is obtained later on by external actors. The paper presents Sovereign Data Logics as a principles guaranteeing that originating economies own and profit from their trade data as a solution to this asymmetry.

It suggests a modular, non-coding data governance structure that connects high-stakes global standards with low-tech production realities.The paper uses the Kaduna–Lagos grain corridor as a case study to show how switching from compliance-driven to sovereignty-driven architectures might unleash “Traceability Dividends.”

The study comes to the conclusion that transforming traceability from an extraction tool into a platform for active data governance and national value retention is vital for the future of trade in the Global South. This research establishes a foundational theoretical basis for applied system architectures, including TerraVerify, designed to bridge the data-trust gap in global extractives..