Tailor-Made: AFCFTA NEGOTIATIONS, IMPLEMENTATION AND BRANDING
Announcement in Brief
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Programme Rationale
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement represents the most ambitious economic integration in Africa since the creation of the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and it is one of the pillars of the African Union Agenda 2063. Its main objective is to create a single continental market for goods and services, with free movement of people and investments, in order to promote intra-African trade, reduce dependence from foreign markets, improve competitiveness, support economic transformation and pave the way for the establishment of a customs union in Africa.
As part of the capacity building program ‘towards an effective implementation of AfCFTA’ jointly imple- mented by ECA and the Government of Italy, two studies were conducted respectively on the impact of Preferential Trade Agreements and capacity needs assessment in the eight (8) countries targeted, namely: Angola, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Senegal, Uganda, and Tanzania
The report on capacity needs gap was helpful to identify the main training needs from national stakeholders both from private and public sectors in each country and therefore design a suitable tailor-made course to bridge the gap.
This curriculum is proposed by ASeS/CeFor, partner in the implementation of the capacity building program and will focus on (1) AfCFTA negotiations: pros and cons. (2) Key AfCFTA implementation mechanisms. (3) Branding and marketing of products under AfCFTA. These issues will be discussed during a two-day online course.
Objectives
The course objectives are :
- To analyse the pros and cons of AfCFTA, identify weaknesses and potential solutions, emphasize the
advantages and elaborate necessary strategies and operational actions. - To provide an overview of the actions each government should implement to make AfCFTA's operations more streamlined and suitable for intra-regional trade development.
- To define the guidelines for the implementation of strategies suitable for potential new markets, where,
through the 3W (where-what-why) scheme, new approaches, new proposals and new markets can be
