African leaders bank on free trade agreement to create customs unions

PUBLISHED ON July 11th, 2019

African leaders bank on free trade agreement to create customs unions

The African Union expects the single market to boost trade among the 52 out of 55 member states who have signed the pact.

The leaders are rooting for removal of intra-trade fragmentation among African Countries to attract small- and large-scale investments.

Sunday in Niamey, Niger 52 out of 53 countries signed the AfCFTA agreement and according to AU the free trade pact will rally all the African people to promote the regional economic growth.

The leaders are banking on the AfCFTA to create customs unions that will attract investors boosting the already existing eight regional economic blocs half of which have customs unions.

The Sunday meeting saw Nigeria and Benin joined the list of signatories, leaving Eritrea as the only member of the African Union that have not signed into the historic accord.

Niamey has become the trade zone headquarters for the AfCFTA while Ghana is the secretariat of the trade zone.

The trade deal came into force on May 30, after the deposit of the required minimum 22 instruments of ratification by AU member states to the AU Commission.

Now a total of 27 countries have deposited their AfCFTA ratification to the AU Commission after five more instruments of ratification including Gabon and the Equatorial Guinea deposited theirs on Sunday.

The Chairperson of the African Union Commission said July 7^th will be officially celebrated as the Day of African Integration.

“July 7 from now on will be officially celebrated as the Day of African Integration in commemoration of today’s historic operationalisation of the AfCFTA, as we start the journey the economic integration vision of the Africa we want,” said Faki.

Kenya, which is a member of the COMESA economic bloc, is looking to leverage manufacturing opportunities for intra-Africa trade, with successful implementation increasing spending to 6.7 trillion dollars by 2030.

Once fully operational, the free trade accord is projected to boost the level of intra-Africa trade by more than 52 percent by the year 2022, according to the UN Economic Commission for Africa.

AU expects AfCFTA to culminate into world’s largest free trade zone by the number of participating countries, covering more than 1.2 billion people with a combined gross domestic product of 2.5 trillion U.S. dollars.

Source: KBC

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