Africa Day: AFCFTA

This year May 25 marks the 60th anniversary of AUO
Now called African Union (AU) the organization has chosen “Acceleration of AfCFTA
implementation” as its theme for 2023
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)
is one of the 13 flagship projects of Agenda 2063:
The Africa We Want, of the African Union
Let’s look into the AfCFTA.
If it succeeds
The agreements will connect 1.3 billion people in a market. so imagine you have a product that can Potentially connect to a market of 1.3b people
Let me drop a hint here,
if you are a business developer it’s time to think of new technology to boost productivity across to a potential 1.3b people.
Now let’s dig further.
The FTA
would potentially increase Africa’s exports by $560
billion, mostly in manufacturing;
The good thing about a free trade area is that it encourages competition, which consequently increases a country’s efficiency,
in order to be on par with its competitors.
Products and services then become of better quality at a lower cost.
Although This is dicey because Local producers may have to sit up else, lose sales to foreign suppliers, because the foreign supply can lower the cost of their products by leveraging the reduced tariffs imposed on imported goods.
Even though it may mean that they can dump sub-standard products into the market. We are already seeing this with some Chinese products.
Another problem will be Since member countries are no longer subject to import taxes, they need to think of ways to compensate for the reduced tax revenue.
This leads to another problem which will be Threat to intellectual property:
When imports are freely traded, domestic producers are often able to copy the products
and sell them as knock-offs
without fear of any legal repercussions.
Actually it’s not all doomsday, because AU
can structure the FTA
to include provisions for intellectual property laws and enforcement
because right now, it appears, there are no protections for exporting companies.
Finally, the FTA is very important SMEs so they must also provide their own leadership, as they cannot afford to wait for others to lead them.
This is possible by leveraging on technologies, raising awareness about the initiative and putting on their creative thinking caps. Imagine the impact on your business,
when suddenly it opened up to 1.3bn people! We need to be ready for this opportunity.
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[@tallhernny]

This is amazing 👏🏾
Especially for small businesses and start ups.