The operational instruments of the AfCFTA

1.The Rules of Origin: A regime governing the conditions under which a product or service can be traded duty free across the region.

2. The Tariff concessions: It has been agreed that there should be 90 per cent tariff liberalisation and the deadline is 1st July 2020. (Over a 10 year period with a 5 year transition, there will be an additional 7 per cent for “sensitive products” that must be liberalised). This will be supported by the AfCFTA Trade in Goods online portal where Member States will upload their tariff offers covering 90% of the tariff lines.

The AfCFTA Online Negotiation Tool

• Facilitate the negotiations on tariff liberalisation between State Parties, Customs Unions or Regional Groupings under the AfCFTA;

• Provide tools to ensure the technical quality of the offers made;

• Increase transparency while safeguarding confidentiality; and

• Provide tools for users/negotiating groups to interact.

The tool will be accessible to all parties to assist in their negotiations and will be a collaborative platform to exchange the lists of products defined at the tariff line level as well as the tariff that could be applied.

The tool will allow each party to:- define their own product lists; share lists with selected parties for discussion; comment on shared lists; and suggest counter proposals.

In order to facilitate the creation of initial product lists, a module will analyse various factors among which are:- fiscal revenues; employment by sector; production; potential trade; existing tariffs; commitments; and Infant industries.

Based on this methodology, the tool will automatically suggest product lists as a potential starting point for negotiation, taking into account the tariff-dismantling schedules.

3.The Continental Online Tool/Mechanism for monitoring, reporting and elimination of Non-tariff Barriers (NTBs): (NTBs) are a greater hindrance to intra-African Trade than Tariff Barriers.

One of the key objectives of the AfCFTA is to progressively eliminate existing NTBs and refrain from introducing new ones in order to enhance and facilitate intra Africa trade. The Continental tool will ensure NTBs are monitored with a view to ensuring they are eliminated.

4.The Pan-African Payments and Settlement System (PAPSS): Is a centralised payment and settlement infrastructure for intra-African trade and commerce payments.

This project which is being developed in collaboration with the African Export-Import Bank, Afreximbank will facilitate payments as well as formalise some of the unrecorded trade due to prevalence of informal cross-border trade in Africa.

It will also provide alternative to current high-cost and lengthy correspondent banking relationships to facilitate trade and other economic activities among African countries through a simple, low-cost and risk-controlled payment clearing and settlement system.

The benefits of PAPPS for cross-border payments include cost reduction; reduction in duration and time variability; decreasing liquidity requirements of commercial banks; decreasing liquidity requirements of central banks for settlement as well as its own payments; and strengthening Central Banks’ oversight of cross border payment systems.

5. The African Trade Observatory: A trade information portal that will address hindrances to trade in Africa due to lack of information about opportunities, trade statistics as well as information about exporters and importers in countries.

The lack of up-to-date and reliable trade data and statistics is one of the contributing factors to the low level of official intra-African trade.

Instances abound of goods and services, which could have been sourced from other African countries being imported by African countries.

According to ITC (2018), more than 40 per cent of African companies identify lack of access to information and absence of inquiry points as factors affecting the business environment across the continent.

Whereas, a number of African countries and Regional Economic Communities (RECs) have established trade information portals and systems several challenges remain such as: outdated information; uniformity of data; absence of data and information on non-tariff measures and informal trade and limited collaboration between various government agencies as well as countries and RECs.

The trade observatory will act as a central repository providing exhaustive qualitative and quantitative trade data and information at the continental level to enable policymakers and the private sector to make evidenced-based policies and business decisions.