By 2025, roughly 47 countries submitted their tariff schedules under the 90% liberalisation commitment, and the Guided Trade Initiative (GTI) also enabled select transactions in areas such as processed food, pharmaceuticals and automotive components. Yet the paradox is one that is unavoidable: tariff elimination has transformed the legal landscape of African trade a little more quickly than it has changed production patterns on the ground.

This disparity is more structural than it is theoretical. Intra-African trade is still stuck around 16–17% of total African trade, which limits the immediate industrial payoff that tariff cuts would normally deliver. Supply networks remain fragmented, logistics costs are among the highest in the world, and non-tariff barriers (NTBs) are more binding than duties ever were. The result is that AfCFTA’s first five years delivered political momentum, but it has not yet delivered the continental industrialisation wave many expected by 2025.

Diagnosing the implementation bottlenecks

The dominant constraint has been regulatory more than fiscal. UNCTAD’s 2023 and 2024 assessments showed that Africa’s NTMs (Non-Tariff Measures), more especially divergent sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) standards, technical barriers to trade (TBTs), licensing rules and duplicative conformity assessments, function as tariffs “in disguise,” usually  imposing costs that are equivalent to 30–50% ad valorem in a few sectors. The AfCFTA Secretariat’s own NTB Reporting Mechanism recorded over 250 active complaints between 2021 and 2024, with many taking a couple of months to resolve. In practice, some firms face border delays even where tariffs have been fully removed.

Rules of origin (RoO) are the second major bottleneck. Even though over 88% of RoO product lines had been agreed upon by 2024, utilisation is still extremely low, partly because SMEs lack the documentation, traceability and compliance systems that are needed to qualify. This has undermined preferential trading flows: exporters in textiles, agro-processing and light manufacturing often default to MFN regimes because RoO paperwork is very complex or too slow to certify.

The third constraint is uneven customs digitalisation and trade facilitation capacity. Based on the African Development Bank’s latest Trade Facilitation Index, it is said that less than a third of members have fully operational single windows, and interoperability across borders is rare. Without digital certificates, pre-arrival processing and automated valuation, tariff preferences are almost impossible to translate into predictable supply chain timelines, and industrial upgrading can’t occur in an environment where logistical risk is high.

Practical firm-level policy fixes for the next phase

The next five years has to transition from legal integration to operational integration. That kind of shift requires policy tools that directly affect firms’ behaviour rather than just adjusting national schedules.

One urgent intervention is the creation of RoO Support Centres at big industrial corridors like Durban–Gaborone, Mombasa–Nairobi–Kigali, Abidjan–Accra–Lagos. These centres should aim to offer onsite verification, assistance with input tracing, real-time HS classification guidance and sped up documentary reviews. Evidence from the EU’s customs union demonstrates that simplification and technical support dramatically increase RoO utilisation rates; Africa needs a version suited to SMEs and informal manufacturers.

A second fix is sector-specific regulatory harmonisation pilots. Rather than attempting a continent-wide alignment of SPS/TBT regimes, an administratively impossible task, governments should lean towards targeting high-potential value chains such as leather, pharmaceuticals and agro-processing. Establishing mutual recognition agreements for labs, packaging standards and certification in these sectors would help to unlock trade much quicker  than general harmonisation. East Africa’s success in harmonising pharmaceutical GMP standards shows the feasibility and impact of such targeted alignment.

Third, Africa has to significantly scale trade finance and local-currency settlement. Afreximbank’s Pan-African Payments and Settlement System (PAPSS) became operational in a number of West African countries by 2024 but requires continent-wide adoption to reduce USD-denominated transaction costs. Paired with blended finance instruments that provide pre-shipment and receivables financing for AfCFTA-certified exporters, this would address one of the most cited barriers among manufacturers: liquidity constraints and exchange-rate volatility.

Finally, tariff elimination has to be tied to supplier-development industrial policy. Countries like Morocco and Rwanda show that linking tariff preferences to investment incentives, quality-upgrade funds, and targeted skills programmes creates the firm-level productivity gains that make regional value chains effective. Without this intentional scaffolding, tariff liberalisation remains a macro reform with micro-level ineffectiveness.

Written By: 

*Dr Iqbal Survé

Past chairman of the BRICS Business Council and co-chairman of the BRICS Media Forum and the BRNN

*Sesona Mdlokovana

Associate at BRICS+ Consulting Group 

Africa Specialist

** MORE ARTICLES ON OUR WEBSITE https://bricscg.com/

** Follow https://x.com/brics_daily on X/Twitter for daily BRICS+ updates

Source link