Levious Chiukira on Customs and Trade

By Levious Chiukira   Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) continue to face unwarranted barriers in cross-border trade under the current trading regime. Unless specific measures are taken to eliminate these barriers under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), SMEs will continue to face the same challenges. The  World Bank  estimates that if the AfCFTA's goals are fully realized, 50 million people could escape extreme poverty by 2035, and real income could rise by 9 per cent. Under deep integration, Africa's exports to the rest of the world would go up by 32 per cent by 2035, and intra-African exports would grow by 109 per cent, led by manufactured goods. However, these predictions were made without adequate policy interventions to facilitate SMEs to benefit from the establishment fully. Research by  International Trade Centre (2022)  highlighted that despite the excitement in capitals and overseas about the AfCFTA, only some African firms are awar...

    The direct trade participation of SMEs in developing countries is not in line with their importance at the domestic level. Compared to large firms, however, few SMEs export – direct exports representing just 3% of total SME manufacturing sales, compared to 14% for large enterprises (World Trade Organization, 2016). The process of exporting goods and services is a mammoth task which requires investments in human resources and capital. This has discouraged many SMEs. Those who choose to take up the risk are faced with non-tariff barriers (NTBs) starting from internal to regional level.   Trade facilitation is key for the success of SMEs exports and this should start at national level building up to the global. Trade facilitation looks at how procedures and controls governing the movement of goods across national borders can be improved to reduce associated cost burdens and maximize efficiency while safeguarding leg...

  The global COVID-19 pandemic is plunging the world into a socioeconomic and financial crisis of an unprecedented scale, in addition to the acute health crisis. The crisis has exposed and exacerbated vulnerabilities and inequalities in both developing and developed countries, deepening poverty and exclusion and pushing the most vulnerable even further behind. The shattering effects have been more visible to the African continent which has consolidated its energies in the creation of an African Economic Community (AEC) prior to the eruption of the pandemic in December 2019 in China.   Africa doesn’t have the luxury of time and cannot follow the traditional path to economic integration. Africa has to abandon the EU linear model of integration and create our own model which is acquainted with the peculiar African challenges. It worth to mention that the integration of Europe happened at the time the world financial systems had the capacity to fund the initiatives and reconst...

  The launched African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA ) which houses a GDP of USD 2.5 trillion and a population of 1.2 billion people has the been regarded as the answer to African intra-regional trade challenges. The AfCFTA comes at a time where African economies have shown little capacities to transform their economies through trade as there has been little progress on the diversification of exports and value addition to the exports of primary goods manly minerals and agricultural produce. The AfCFTA comes as one of the flagship projects of African Union Agenda 2063. Agenda 2063 is a strategic framework for the socio- economic transformation of the continent over the next 50 years. It builds on, and seeks to accelerate the implementation of past and existing continental initiatives for growth and sustainable development. Key to Agenda 2063 is epitomising sustainable development as a key result of African integration. There are other     key programmes and initi...

Africa has rolled out the African Free Trade Area which has been bestowed with what I assume are high expectations. As I write the AfCFTA is being showered with praises as being historic and going to stimulate and improve the intra-African trade.   I remain pessimistic about AfCFTA and the figures being thrown around as its potential achievements. Protagonists has continued to use statistics quoted in policy papers presented at different conferences and to me most of these figures and targets are out of reach for the AfCFTA and when times comes it will make this project a failure. AfCFTA is comes at a time tariff reductions have failed and nationalism is on the rise as nations are fighting the crippling devastating effects of COVID-19. As the debate of free trade areas rages on without a conclusive stance, what has won is the push for trade liberalism which the forces I shall call the ‘invisible actors’ dominating the discourses and research around the continental free trade area. ...

  With the launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA)     on the 1st of January 2021 the long wait was over and it was the start of a new era.   The AfCFTA will cover a market of 1.2 billion people and a gross domestic product (GDP) of $2.5 trillion, across all 55 member States of the African Union. In terms of numbers of participating countries, AfCFTA will be the world’s largest free trade area since the formation of the World Trade Organization.   It comes against a background of COVID-19 which has disrupted the normal trading routine leaving industries hanging on the balance across Africa. The new business normal brought in by the effects of COVID-19 will result in the AfCFTA having to be adjusted to ensure that its intentions and objectives are realised.   Most African economies are sustained by Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which are mostly owned by Africans. Research have shown that SMEs constitute the greatest proportion of...