AfCFTA Rises Intra-African Trade By 20% — UNECA

The Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) said the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) increased intra-African trade by 20 per cent in 2022.

However, this is against the commission’s prediction of 52 per cent by 2022.

Antonio Pedro, Acting Executive Secretary, UNECA, while speaking on the sidelines of the Ninth Session of the Africa Regional Forum on Sustainable Development in Niamey, Niger, noted that the level of trade had increased.

When he was asked if the commission had achieved the objective of 52 per cent intra-African trade, Pedro said “Certainly not yet. But the levels of intra-African trade have gone up from 13 per cent or so, before the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement was adopted, to now around 20 per cent but that is not good enough because other regions are trading amongst themselves.

“I mean, above 70 per cent or so Europe, Asia. So, that certainly is our target.”

He disclosed that the rise in intra-African trade, was already encouraging certain countries to trade amongst themselves.

The acting executive secretary added “Under the AfCFTA Trade Division, Kenya, a couple of other countries Ethiopia and so on and so forth.

“So now it’s really about scale, it is about making these movements that cover the entire continent.

“One is to look at the product complementarity between our countries, so we could have African countries trading inputs with another country where, perhaps, you have a much larger processing capacity and one example that I like to cite is between, for example, Gabon and Cameroon.

“Cameroon has processing facilities for palm oil products that require additional inputs coming from the sub region, and in this case, one could look at certain processed palm oil products coming from Gabon being processed in Cameroon to produce from soaps to oils to all sorts of other things.”

Pedro declared that these were some of the efforts which needed to happen, stressing that the commission was making a trade decision supporting modelling, which was an exercise to identify the best export destinations for African countries.

He pointed out that the distance within African countries was much farther away than the distance between Africa and other continents.

According to him, “In the case of Cameroon that we have done one study; Nigeria certainly is the closest trade destination, however, what is very interesting is that a country that is not far from Cameroon which is the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is trade distance.

“Countries that are miles away, China and the U.S. are closer trade wise to Cameroon than DRC.

“Why is it that DRC is a trade distant is because there are issues with infrastructure. There are issues with essentially the connections and we need to address those binding constraints to Africa trading amongst themselves such as infrastructure.”