After several attempts and missing deadlines for joining other nations in trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), Nigeria is set to begin the formal export of locally produced commodities to South Africa, Rwanda, Cameroon and Kenya from next month under the Guided Trade Initiative of the African Continental Free Trade Area, the national centre of AfCFTA announced recently.
Although some businesses in Nigeria currently export products to these countries, they make such exports informally, but beginning April, Nigerian companies would start the official and formal export of commodities to African nations under the AfCFTA treaty.
The African Continental Free Trade Area is a free trade agreement established among 54 of the 55 African Union nations, creating the largest free trade area in the world by the number of participating countries.
Speaking on the sidelines of the Abuja Stakeholders Workshop on the AfCFTA Digital Trade Protocol, on Thursday, the Executive Secretary, National Action Committee on AfCFTA, Olusegun Awolowo, told journalists that though trading under the main AfCFTA had yet to start, the secretariat of the programme had introduced the Guided Trade Initiative.
He said, “We haven’t started trading in AfCFTA, we are duly going through the protocols. But recently the AfCFTA secretariat itself launched what they call the Guided Trade Initiative to get some countries to start trading outside their regional blocks.
“We’ve signed onto it and I think that by the end of April we are taking a few companies, big, medium and small enterprises to actually launch trading in Africa. All we are doing now is that we are going through and signing all the protocols, as well as finding a way on how to implement them.
