The African Continental Free Trade Area entered into force in 2021 with a mandate that, on paper, created the largest free trade area in the world by number of participating countries: fifty-four African economies, tariffs eliminated on the large majority of traded goods, a single continental market that supporters compared to the European Union’s founding ambition. Trading under AfCFTA preferences formally began in 2021 as well, and the summit language since has been consistently optimistic about intra-African trade’s potential to finally exceed Africa’s trade with the rest of the world. Actual preferential trade volumes moving under the agreement’s terms have grown far more slowly than the ambition suggested, and the single most cited technical reason is not tariffs at all. It is rules of origin, the detailed criteria determining whether a given product actually counts as African-made and therefore qualifies for AfCFTA’s preferential treatment.
Why the Rules Exist and What They Cost
Rules of origin exist for a defensible reason: without them, a manufacturer outside Africa could ship a finished product to the continent’s most lightly regulated port, relabel it, and export it tariff-free to fifty-three other markets, hollowing out the entire preference regime and turning AfCFTA into a backdoor for non-African goods. The rules require that a product contain a specified share of African-sourced value or undergo substantial transformation on the continent to qualify. That requirement is sound in principle and, in practice, has produced a rulebook so granular, product category by product category, that many African exporters, particularly small and medium manufacturers without dedicated trade-compliance staff, cannot easily determine whether their own goods qualify, or navigate the documentation required to prove it at a border post.
The compliance burden falls unevenly. Larger economies with established manufacturing bases and specialised trade ministries, South Africa, Egypt, and to a lesser extent Nigeria and Kenya, have the institutional capacity to help their exporters certify origin and dispute unfavourable rulings. Smaller economies, and the small and medium enterprises that make up the overwhelming majority of intra-African trade by volume even if not by value, frequently do not. The rules were negotiated to be neutral across all fifty-four signatories. Their practical effect concentrates the benefit among the economies that already had the strongest manufacturing and trade-administration capacity before the agreement existed.
The rules were negotiated to be neutral. Their practical effect concentrates the benefit among the economies that already had the strongest capacity before the agreement existed.
The Chicken-and-Egg Problem Underneath
The deeper structural issue is that rules of origin reward exactly the kind of integrated, multi-stage manufacturing capacity that AfCFTA was partly designed to help create, which means the countries least equipped to meet the thresholds today are, in many cases, the ones the agreement most needed to help. A textile manufacturer sourcing raw cotton domestically clears the origin threshold more easily than one importing fabric inputs from outside the continent because domestic textile-processing capacity does not yet exist at the required scale, a gap AfCFTA’s tariff preferences were partly supposed to help close by making regional sourcing more commercially attractive. The rules, as currently calibrated in several product categories, risk locking in the existing manufacturing geography rather than accelerating its spread, because the manufacturers already positioned to meet the thresholds capture the preferential access while those still building capacity face a compliance bar calibrated for economies further along than they are.
What Progress Looks Like From Here
The African Continental Free Trade Area Secretariat has acknowledged the implementation gap directly, and negotiations on outstanding rules of origin for several sensitive product categories, automotive, textiles, and agro-processing among them, have continued years past the agreement’s formal entry into force, evidence that the technical work was harder than the 2021 launch date implied rather than a sign of bad faith among negotiators. Digital trade facilitation tools, a continental guided-trade initiative testing preferential trade on a limited set of products among a smaller group of willing states, and simplified trade regimes for small-scale cross-border traders represent genuine attempts to build capacity incrementally rather than assume it into existence by treaty text. Whether AfCFTA delivers on its founding promise will depend less on the next summit’s rhetoric than on whether these narrower, more technical fixes- the actual plumbing of rules of origin, customs documentation, and compliance support for smaller exporters- get resourced with the same seriousness the original agreement’s signing ceremony received. The trade agreement was the easy part. Making the paperwork match the ambition is the part still being built.
What makes the gap worth tracking closely is that it will not resolve itself through time alone. A rulebook calibrated against the manufacturing capacity that exists today will keep favouring the economies that already had it, unless the phase-in periods, technical assistance funding, and simplified compliance tracks currently being piloted are deliberately weighted toward the smaller economies the agreement was supposed to lift rather than the larger ones already positioned to benefit. AfCFTA’s founding promise was continental. Its early implementation record is regional, concentrated among the handful of economies that could meet the paperwork on day one, and closing that gap is now a test of whether the agreement’s second phase gets built with the same urgency as its ceremonial launch.
