AfCFTA at five: The $3.4 trillion market Africa still won’t trade in
Blessing runs a small shea butter and cosmetics workshop off the Calabar-Ikom Road, and for two years she has been trying to get her cream jars onto the shelves of a cosmetics chain in Bamenda, Cameroon. The order is not the problem; the buyer wants her product and has said so in writing. The problem […] The post AfCFTA at five: The $3.4 trillion market Africa still won’t trade in appeared first…
The AfCFTA, signed five years ago, has yet to transform Africa's trade landscape, despite its promise of a $3.4 trillion market. Blessing, a small-scale producer, faces lengthy customs procedures while shipping her goods to Cameroon or Rotterdam. The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) has signed by forty-four countries, but only fifty-four have ratified it, with four still to do so.
The initiative's architecture is in place, but actual trade under its preferences remains limited. Only about half of Africa's economies benefit from tariff concessions, and non-oil exports, such as cocoa, fertilizers, and cashews, still dominate. Nigeria and South Africa are notable exceptions, with South Africa using AfCFTA to diversify exports.
However, intra-African trade still accounts for a small fraction of the continent's total trade, and the AfCFTA has yet to become a true single market.
Written by urgent.news from Nairametrics's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
