Role and Progress of the AfCFTA?

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), launched on January 1, 2021, is a game-changer for Africa’s economic landscape, and as of March 11, 2025, it’s steadily reshaping how the continent does business. At its core it aims to create a single, integrated market for goods and services across 54 of Africa’s 55 nations (Eritrea’s the holdout), covering 1.3 billion people and a combined GDP pushing $3.4 trillion.

Organisation’s objectives:

• Fostering specialization and accelerating industrialization;
• Expanding employment and investment opportunities;
• Advancing technological development;
• Enabling African-owned businesses to enter new markets, broaden their clientele, and develop new goods and services;
• Bridging the manufacturing gap;
• Providing more opportunities for MSMEs to generate more well-paying jobs, particularly for young people;
• Boosting investments that provide cash to indigenous companies; streamlining the process of importing raw materials from other African nations;
• Allowing MSMEs (Micro-Small and Medium Enterprises) to establish assembly companies in other African nations to provide more affordable production methods (macmap.org).

Here’s a personal experience to remind us all why the AfCFTA is important. About 5 years ago we got involved in a construction project in neighboring Mali. We needed tiles and found beautiful artisanal tiles manufactured in a village in Niger. We decided to go for these, as opposed to order in Europe. The deciding factor was to support the local village artisans and their craft.

So we placed our order with the village. Some weeks later our order was ready, which we collected with a 15 ton truck. Once export formalities were in order, our truck crossed the border on the way to Mali via Burkina Faso. The journey, not without its fair share of delays, took about 4 weeks. Our order eventually was delivered to our construction site with limited tiles breakages.

In the end, when we factored in all costs, we concluded that it would have cost the project 30% less if we had ordered the same volumes of tiles from Europe, transport included. We find this outrageous!

Where is the AFCFTA today?

By 2025, 47 countries have ratified it, and tariff reductions are rolling out—slowly but surely. Pilot projects, like Ghana exporting machinery to Kenya tariff-free, show it’s not just talk. The AfCFTA Secretariat in Accra pushing digital trade tools, like the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS), to cut currency exchange headaches.

Logistics lag—transport costs in Africa are 2-4 times higher than in Asia due to poor roads and ports. Non-tariff barriers (think corrupt checkpoints or mismatched standards) still clog borders. Funding’s tight too; the $10 billion AfCFTA Adjustment Fund is trickling in slower than hoped.

AfCFTA’s a lifeline. ECOWAS countries like Nigeria and Ghana are leaning in—Nigeria’s exported cement to Niger spiked 20% in 2024 under AfCFTA rules. But trucking delays and port chaos (e.g., Lagos) blunt the gains, tying back to those infrastructure gaps.

AfCFTA’s role is to stitch Africa’s patchwork economies into a powerhouse, flipping the script from colonial trade patterns (raw goods out, finished goods in) to a self-reliant continent. It’s not just economics—it’s a political flex, proving Africa can coordinate at scale. Full impact? Decades off. But it’s already nudging GDP growth (1-2% annually by some estimates) and forcing governments to rethink infrastructure and skills.