Intra-African Trade

In 2000, the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) was enacted with a bold promise to serve as the bridge connecting Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) to the U.S. market. AGOA was designed to offer unilateral, duty – free access to over 1800 products in the U.S., in addition to the more than 5,000 products that are also eligible for duty-free access under the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) program, to catalyze export-led growth, attract foreign direct investment and accelerate industrialization across Africa. As AGOA was set to lapse in 2025 and following several negotiations for the Agreement’s extension to December 2028, today the verdict is mixed, and the economic landscape tells a complicated story. In this blog, I argue that the question before African policymakers is no longer whether AGOA is renewed, but what the repeated cycle of lapse and extension reveals: that a unilateral preference regime, however long its runway, cannot substitute for the regional integration, rules-of-origin harmonization, and mid-stream industrial capabilities that only Africans can build for themselves.

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is the world’s largest free trade area in terms of the participating countries since the formation of the World Trade Organization (WTO). The AfCFTA Agreement brings together 55 African Countries who are contracting member states to the 8 existing Regional Economic Communities in Africa, including the newly formed Alliance of Sahel States (former members of ECOWAS). As of September 2024, 54 of the 55 AU member states have signed the AfCFTA Agreement and 47 have ratified the Agreement. The AfCFTA aims to create a single market for trade in goods and services and allow free access to tradeable commodities across the continent. Although the AfCFTA is not fully operational, meaningful commercial trading has been envisioned through the Guided Trade Initiative (GTI). The GTI is a pilot project that tests the operational, institutional, legal and trade policy environment of the AfCFTA.

The Blog Symposium is therefore a collective intellectual journey across Africa’s diverse regions, from north to south, west to east. It reflects a multiplicity of perspectives, backgrounds, and academic traditions, united by a shared commitment to Africa’s economic integration and transformation. This could have not been possible without the assistance, advise and support of Prof Olabisi Akinkugbe and the whole AfronomicsLaw team. We are grateful for this platform which is making an unprecedented contribution in amplifying African voices in the space of international (economic) law.

Ajibo’s The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement: Legal and Policy Frameworks offers a comprehensive analysis of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Agreement, its challenges, prospects, and recommendations for future directions. The book equally explores the AfCFTA Agreement’s expected impact on economic growth, regional integration, and legal harmonisation, together with its Protocols, thereby serving as the go-to text for students, researchers, and legal practitioners interested in the ambitious goals of the AfCFTA Agreement. Although other textbooks have been written about the AfCFTA, Ajibo painstakingly adds some twists to this text as he examines the AfCFTA Agreement together with its protocols, such as the Protocols on Trade in Services, Trade in Goods, Investment, Intellectual Property, Rules on Dispute Settlement, and Competition Policy.

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.

The AfCFTA, which aims at setting up a single market for goods and services ‘from Cairo to Cape Town’, is the subject of the eloquent monograph written by Professor Kufuor. The author, a well-known scholar on African legal affairs, has published extensively, inter alia, on world trade, on (the problems of) African integration and on RECs. Therefore, he is eminently qualified to write about the pan-African ‘Trading Order’.

The African Youth Essay Competition, organized by AfCFTA Dialogues, aims to promote awareness and foster the exchange of ideas about the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and African development. In commemoration of African Integration Day, the inaugural edition in 2024 engages young Africans in discussions on the significance of the AfCFTA, with a focus on advocating for the free movement of Africans within the continent to facilitate economic integration and drive sustainable development.

The News and Events category publishes the latest News and Events relating to International Economic Law relating to Africa and the Global South. Every week, Afronomicslaw.org receive the News and Events in their e-mail accounts. The News and Events published every week include conferences, major developments in the field of International Economic Law in Africa at the national, sub-regional and regional levels as well as relevant case law. News and Events with a Global South focus are also often included.

This article argues that the Southern African Development Community (SADC) is not living up to its potentials. It identifies some of the challenges inhibiting the actualization of the SADC objectives and it proffers some solutions necessary to meet these challenges.