How AfCFTA-regional relations can support continental trade
Authors
As the AfCFTA takes shape, it raises the crucial question: who should implement what, and how? With Faizel Ismail, director of the Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance at the University of Cape Town, Bruce Byiers and Philomena Apiko explore the roles of and relations between the AfCFTA and regional bodies, to identify where and how these might be shaped to benefit trade.
Summary
As the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) process moves to the implementation phase, questions arise about who should do what and how. The AfCFTA secretariat has a clear lead role to play, yet it is often heard that ‘the regional economic communities (RECs) are the building blocs of the AfCFTA’, thus introducing ambiguities about roles and relations.
This paper reviews, discusses and analyses relations between the AfCFTA secretariat and regional bodies, both on paper and in practice, to identify where and how these might be shaped to jointly benefit both regional and AfCFTA trade. Beyond the ‘building blocs’ ambition stated in the AfCFTA agreement, the paper highlights the need to distinguish between RECs and other economic communities in terms of their integration and wider contexts. It identifies seven different types of AfCFTA-regional relations in the negotiated protocols and annexes of the agreement, ranging from unification to harmonisation, complementarity, subsidiarity, coordination, cooperation and peer-learning.
Given the scale of the AfCFTA ambitions and limited resources, the paper argues for the need to link top-down AfCFTA institutional and legal frameworks with bottom-up, agenda-specific problem-solving around implementation. It also calls for adaptive, strategic partnerships among the AfCFTA secretariat, member states, regional bodies and other continental bodies and international partners.
