Stakeholders in the trading sector call for inclusive policies that will rope in all levels of traders in the effective implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
Trade associations such as the Ghana Institute of Freight Forwarders (GIFF), Ghana Union of Trader Associations (GUTA) and trade policy think-tank AfCFTA Policy Network indicate that the single continental market must be built around the trading community.
“Everything that must be done for the formative stages of any program of this sort has been done. But I want to believe that we have not set the stage once again just for the conferencing entrepreneurs, to be the ones who will best benefit from all that there is to AfCFTA.
Traders must be the pivot of this agenda and they should be at the centre of all this conversation,” Kwabena Ofosu Appiah, immediate-past President of GIFF, told Single African Market.
The players hope that there won’t be an overemphasis on conferences, as well as policy deliberations, and ignore the core beneficiaries of the agreement, which includes the trader, Louis Yaw Afful, Executive Director of the AfCFTA Policy Network, adds.
The industry players are calling for a strategy to attract African traders to buy from the African market.
Mr. Afful adds: “The Africa trade observatory, which is a common platform where all tariff concessions should be working and published by this time”.
To Dr. Joseph Obeng, President of GUTA, the single continental market was a good thing for traders but urged that some of the protocols, including rules of origin, must be fast-tracked.
“We are over-dwelling on the continental free trade policy and framework and talking about it. But the actual information that is being sought by the trading community is virtually nil,” he argues.
He further queried: “What strategies have we done to bait people into buying from Africa apart from the duties? What we want to know is what items are produced in Africa, at which cost and at which duty rates that we are seeking?
Dr. Obeng says there must be a conscious effort from promoters of the continental market to build connectivity and partnerships amongst traders.
“So now we have to build new relationships and all that how are we going to do this? I haven’t even seen that a conscious effort is being made to bring us up by way of trade fairs, where all manufacturing companies that are permissible under the continental free trade could be grouped,” he says.
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