The Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) has reported that the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCTA) agreement increased intra-African trade by 20% in 2022.
The Executive Secretary of the commission, Antonio Pedro, made this disclosure at the 9th session of the African Regional Forum on Sustainable Development held in Niamey, Niger Republic.
Despite the impact of the AfCTA pact on the intra-African trade during the year, Pedro noted that the 20% addition still fell short of the 52% target for last year and was not good enough for the continent.
He said: “The levels of intra-African trade have gone up from 13 percent or so, before the African Continental Trade Area agreement was adopted to now around 20 percent but that is not good enough because other regions are trading among themselves. I mean above 70 percent or so in Europe and Asia. So, that certainly is our target.”
According to him, the implementation of the pack is improving trade relations among some countries in Africa, saying that “under the AfCTA Trade Division, Kenya, and a couple od other countries such as Ethiopia and so on are improving bilateral trade.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 products that require additional inputs coming from the sub-region, and in this case, one could look at certain processed palm oil product coming from Gabon being processed in Cameroon to produce from soaps to oils to all sorts of other things”, Pedro added.
He hinted that as part of its commitment to boost intra-African trade, the commission was making a trade supporting modeling, which was an exercise aimed at identifying the best export destinations for African countries.
