By Assome Aminata Diatta, former Minister of Trade and SMEs of Senegal, former Chair of the AfCFTA Council of Ministers of Trade
On 15 June 2015, when African Union Heads of State and Government launched the negotiations for the future continental free trade area in Johannesburg, I asked myself a question I never dared say out loud: what will it really be for, given that even within our own customs unions we trade so little with one another? Eleven years later, after long weeks spent negotiating the Agreement on behalf of Senegal and after chairing the Council of Ministers of Trade of the States Parties, I note one thing: most business leaders, most consultants and even most public officials I meet do not really know what the AfCFTA is. And nobody picks up a tool they do not know. So let us start from the beginning, without jargon.
What exactly is the AfCFTA?
Begin with a distinction that almost every debate confuses. In a free trade area, States Parties remove customs duties between themselves while each remains free to set its own terms of access towards third countries. In a customs union such as WAEMU or ECOWAS, they add a common external tariff applied uniformly to outside partners. The AfCFTA belongs to the first category: it organises trade among Africans, it does not dictate our trade policy towards Europe, Asia or the Americas.
The tariff mechanics come down to three figures. Each State Party liberalises 90 per cent of its tariff lines, over five years for developing countries and ten years for least developed countries. The remaining 10 per cent is split between sensitive products (7 per cent), liberalised over a longer period, and excluded products (3 per cent), temporarily exempted. That is where the products our industries fear are lodged, from sugar to flour to poultry, and it is why drawing up those lists is an intensely political exercise, conducted sector by sector.
Signed in Kigali on 21 March 2018, in force since 30 May 2019 and effective for trade since 1 January 2021, the Agreement has been signed by 54 of the 55 African Union member States, 49 of which have deposited their instruments of ratification. It is the largest trade agreement in the world by number of participating countries, a market of 1.4 billion people with a combined gross domestic product of around 3,400 billion dollars.
One point almost nobody knows, and it changes everything in practice: the AfCFTA does not replace the ECOWAS or WAEMU regimes, it sits alongside them. Regional preferences continue to apply, and it is the exporter who chooses the regime under which goods are presented. Being able to compare two preferential regimes on the same shipment is therefore a direct commercial skill, not a lawyers’ debate.
A tariff agreement? No: a complete legal architecture
Reducing the AfCFTA to customs duties on goods is the most widespread mistake. The Agreement is being built in stages and now covers a far wider field: trade in goods and trade in services in the first phase, then the protocols on investment, intellectual property and competition policy, and finally digital trade and the protocol on women and youth in trade.
Translate that into business language. Your mango exports fall under goods. Your engineering firm bidding for a contract in Kigali falls under services. Your brand copied in Cairo falls under intellectual property. Your subsidiary in Abidjan falls under investment. Your pan-African online shop falls under digital trade. Five construction sites, one single edifice, each with its own rules. Each will be the subject of an article in this series.
Add the technical annexes, often decisive and almost never read: sanitary and phytosanitary measures, technical barriers to trade, and mutual recognition of standards and technical regulations. For an agrifood exporter, those annexes usually weigh more than a percentage point of customs duty.
Why it matters, figures in hand
The starting data are well known and humbling: intra-African trade barely exceeds 15 per cent of the continent’s total trade, against more than 60 per cent in Europe. Yet the trade we do with each other is of far better quality than our sales to the rest of the world: the share of processed products is markedly higher, whereas our exports off the continent remain dominated by raw commodities. Trading among ourselves means industrialising. It means jobs and value for our continent, and a future for our young people. It also means, and let us never forget it, buying peace.
The World Bank estimates that a fully implemented AfCFTA would raise the continent’s incomes by 450 billion dollars by 2035 and lift 30 million people out of extreme poverty. A detail rarely noticed: two thirds of that gain comes not from tariffs but from trade facilitation, which is to say less paperwork and faster borders.
For Senegal the translation is concrete and urgent. Africa absorbs only a modest share of our exports, and our African trade is extremely concentrated on the ECOWAS corridor, with Mali alone accounting for more than half of our sales on the continent (ANSD, 2025 data). In other words, we export within Africa over a very short radius, while on African markets beyond ECOWAS our products currently pay duties of 21 to 34 per cent. The AfCFTA can bring those to zero. The question is therefore not whether the market exists, but whether our firms know how to enter it.
What the AfCFTA does not do, and what we should stop expecting from it
Understanding this Agreement also means clearing away five stubborn misconceptions, which I hear in almost every room where I speak.
It does not make your product duty free automatically. The zero rate is not a right acquired at the border: it is claimed, proven and documented. Without valid proof of origin, the full tariff applies, including to a product entirely made in Africa.
It does not harmonise domestic taxation. VAT, excise duties and taxes remain national. Fiscal harmonisation and the common external tariff belong to the next stage of the Abuja Treaty, that of the continental customs union.
It does not liberalise everything, nor all at once. Sensitive and excluded product lists, together with differentiated timetables, exist precisely to protect vulnerable sectors while they prepare.
It does not, by itself, open free movement of persons. That is a separate instrument, and its ratification is advancing far more slowly. No exporter should build a prospecting strategy on the assumption of visa-free mobility.
It does not exempt you from the importing country’s standards. Zero customs duty does not mean zero requirements: labelling, sanitary certificates and checks on arrival remain, and those are what most often stop a consignment.
The problem was never the rules
We know all this. We also know that PAPSS is there for payments, PAPSSCARD for cards, and NAFAD to mobilise development capital. In the end, the problem was never the rules: they have always existed. The problem is implementation. How many reports sleep in our drawers? How many strategies, how many policies? Often, what we are drafting today was already drafted, almost word for word, ten years ago. So let us ask the uncomfortable question: what have we actually done? Have we not all fallen short somewhere, States, private sector and civil society alike?
Three deficits, all of them fixable, explain most of it. The information deficit: most actors are unaware that free tools exist which give, tariff line by tariff line, the applicable rate and the rule to be met. Senegal’s Ministry of Trade and SMEs published a plain-language booklet, « Comprendre la ZLECAf », which already answers most of the questions firms ask. How many business leaders have read it?
Then the rule mastery deficit: exporting under preference is a profession, with its origin criteria, its thresholds, its deadlines and its traps. It is learned neither through speeches nor through improvisation, and a single tariff classification error usually costs more than a year of training.
Finally the network deficit, the most underestimated of the three: trade is first and foremost a matter of relationships. Whom do you call in Tunis to check a customs procedure? Which freight forwarder genuinely knows the Nouakchott corridor? Which bank will walk you through a first settlement via PAPSS? Those answers appear in no manual: they live in address books built only over years of negotiation and fieldwork.
Seven questions to find out where you stand
Rather than a long argument, here is a test. Take your flagship product and answer these seven questions. They are the ones any competent customs service will ask.
1. What is your product’s tariff heading under the Harmonised System, to at least six digits?
2. Which AfCFTA rule of origin applies to that heading: sufficient working or processing, change of tariff heading, or a value added threshold?
3. Does your manufacturing process meet that criterion, imported inputs included, and can you demonstrate it with documents in hand?
4. For a given market, is the ECOWAS regime or the AfCFTA regime more favourable to you, and why?
5. Who in Senegal is empowered to issue your AfCFTA proof of origin, within what time frame and at what cost?
6. For a trial shipment worth 3,000 dollars, which document is enough to obtain preferential treatment?
7. Does your importer know that they must themselves claim the preference in their customs declaration, failing which your document is worthless?
If you stumble on three of these seven questions, your company is not yet exporting under the AfCFTA: it is exporting alongside it. And there is no shame in that, because these answers cannot be improvised. That is exactly why training is once again the most profitable investment of the moment, for the business owner who wants to sell beyond Mali, for the consultant who wants to advise accurately, for the student preparing for the professions of the single market, and for the public official who will have to apply these texts tomorrow morning. All of them need the same foundation: understand the architecture, master the rules, build the network.
First concrete step: the certificate of origin
After the principles comes the first move, and here it is. Your product may be competitive on quality and on price, and still lose its entire advantage at the border for want of proving its preferential origin. The difference is therefore not decided only in the factory or on the price: it is decided on a sheet of paper. That document is the AfCFTA certificate of origin.
Three things to know. One: the historical excuse has gone, 100 per cent of the rules of origin have been agreed since February 2026, textiles and automotive included. Two: there are three proofs of origin, not one, the certificate issued by the competent authority and valid for twelve months, the approved exporter declaration, and the least known of all, self-declaration for any consignment below 5,000 dollars. For an SME testing a market, the way in is therefore a simple statement on its own invoice. Three: the rule depends on the product and can be checked free of charge before you even manufacture. That is where you discover the traps of wholly African sugar for chocolate, of double transformation for textiles, or of the vessel’s flag for fisheries products.
And where does the State stand in all this?
This is the point at which the Senegalese reader should sit down. As at June 2025, South Africa had issued 4,658 AfCFTA certificates of origin, Egypt 2,852 and Tanzania 392. Senegal: no documented certificate. The paradox is complete, because we are excellent students of the regional systems, a pilot country for the ECOWAS electronic certificate launched in November 2024 and a historical pilot for the WAEMU e-certificate, with more than 1,080 documents already exchanged. The skills are there.
What is missing amounts to three administrative acts: designating the AfCFTA competent authority, publishing the tariff schedule, and issuing a first pilot certificate. They cost almost nothing, and every month of delay hands markets carrying 21 to 34 per cent duties to those who already have their document. The State also has a fourth role, less visible and just as decisive: to inform, on a large scale, about what this text already allows.
A word of caution: rules of origin, thresholds, proof templates and competent authorities depend on the applicable text, on the date of the transaction and on national procedures. This article is general information and does not replace confirmation from the customs administrations of the exporting and importing countries. Before making any declaration of origin, verify the tariff classification, the applicable rule and the recognised procedure.
What comes next in this series, and this week’s question
The AfCFTA of services, of intellectual property, of competition, of digital trade, of investment: each will be the subject of an article, with the same method, sourced facts and concrete steps. Eleven years after my silent question in Johannesburg, the answer belongs to me as much as it belongs to you: the AfCFTA will serve those who know it.
This week’s question is therefore addressed to everyone, business leaders, consultants, students and public officials: of the seven questions above, how many can you answer today? And to the State: who will issue Senegal’s first AfCFTA certificate of origin, and when?
Those seven questions are also the thread of a working session we are preparing, under the title « Exporting within the AfCFTA: what strategy and what stakes for SMEs ». If the subject concerns your company, your trade association or your administration, say so in the comments or register your interest at https://assomembodja.com/training and intelligence.
the priorities you express will determine the programme and the order in which topics are covered.
This subject is also a chapter of the first issue of Le Point Stratégique, published on Thursday 27 August: a full picture of Senegal’s trade under the AfCFTA preferential regime, with the data, the circuits and the operational checklist. The summary will be sent free of charge to subscribers at https://assomembodja.com/training and intelligence.