The United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) has said that the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) increased trade between countries in the region by 20 percent in 2022.
UNECA’s acting Executive Secretary, Antonio Pedro, said this on the sidelines of the 9th session of the Africa regional forum on sustainable development in Niamey, Niger Republic.
“… The levels of intra-African trade have gone up from 13 percent or so, before the African Continental Free Trade Area agreement was adopted, to now around 20 percent but that is not good enough because other regions are trading amongst themselves. I mean above 70 percent or so in Europe and Asia. So, that certainly is our target,” Pedro said.
“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.”
The UNECA chief said the commission was making a trade decision supporting modeling, which is an exercise to identify the best export destinations for African countries.
