Rock, Paper, Scissors: Navigating the Policy Trilemma between AGOA, Global Value Chains, and the AfCFTA
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.