The Success of the African Continental Free Trade Agreement in Enhancing Intra-African Trade: Addressing Legal and Regulatory Challenges

The African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA) is an historic project aimed at integrating the African economy, but traditional measurements of its success depend on the trade volumes unevenly. This paper radically redefines this assessment framework by contending that regional trade performance should be gauged mainly by the intensity of legal and regulatory convergence among the member states, and that the volume of trade is to be understood as a by-product of legal and regulatory convergence and not as a measure of success in its own right. The study, based on document analysis of policy texts, trade data, and implementation frameworks in Kenya, Egypt, Morocco, and South Africa, demonstrates that although the AfCFTA has brought about quantifiable trade gains (e.g., a 15.7% increase in shipments to the African market in Kenya in 2022), these gains are susceptible to institutional fragmentation. The results show that the basic impediments to sustainable integration are regulatory incongruency, protectionism, corruption and weak domestic legal regimes. Trade volumes are weak in the case of shallow alignment; they are natural in the case of institutional convergence. The article adds a theoretical framework by questioning traditional trade-based approaches to evaluation, and provides in its place an institutionalist one that places legal-regulatory convergence as the main measure, as well as the starting point, of a real regional integration. Particular suggestions are institutional capacity building, regulatory standardization, and public-private partnerships as the ways of further alignment throughout the continent.