The African Continental Free Trade Area – From Rules on Paper to Trade in Practice?

Five years after the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) opened for trade on 1 January 2021, little trade has so far taken place under its preferences, and intra-African trade has declined as a share of the continent’s total exports. This briefing paper asks why, and assesses the Agreement’s implementation along three dimensions: the legal, the administrative and the economic. On paper, the legal architecture is advanced, but several protocols are not yet in force, and both the detailed rules on which practical effects depend and national implementation lag behind. However, the binding constraint is shifting from the legal texts to the administrative layer and the financing of implementation. Moreover, even a fully operational Agreement starts from the current structure of intra-African trade. Intra-African trade is indeed more manufacturing-intensive than Africa’s trade with the world, but it is concentrated in a few industrial hubs, dominated by resource-based and medium-technology products, and does not reflect the integration of production via regional value chains. Creating African production networks will be the major task for the coming decade, that the AfCFTA can support, but not accomplish on its own.