Nairobi — The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat has launched a digital platform aimed at easing trade on the African continent.
The platform dubbed - The AfCFTA Hub - is an interconnect clearing house for national government, intergovernmental, private, and public digital and partnership platforms to link together all businesses to drive the success of the free trade area.
The hub is designed to grow into a single, trusted directory of the services needed to navigate the AfCFTA for small players, thereby making the AfCFTA the most inclusive Free Trade Area in the world.
"It is important to ensure the centrality of SMEs, startups and female entrepreneurs as we strive to build the world's most inclusive, most innovative and most integrated Single Market." said Wamkele Mene, Secretary General AfCFTA.
Kenya is one of the seven countries that have been selected to start trading under the AfCFTA framework in a pilot phase to test the environmental, legal and trade policy basis for intra-African trade.
Following the selection, the country recently launched its National AfCFTA implementation strategy to fast track implementation of the AfCFTA.
The Strategy identifies priority export products and sectors for goods and services aligned with Kenya's national development goals and aspirations, including the Integrated National Export Development and Promotion Strategy (INEDPS) and the Big Four Agenda.
The launch of the Kenya AfCFTA National Implementation Strategy is one of the key action parts of the EU-funded project: 'Deepening Africa's Trade Integration through Effective Implementation of the AfCFTA to support Economic Integration' with a total budget of € 8 million.
The AfCFTA Hub platform and ongoing engagements among the AfCFTA Hub Network, the Kenya Export Promotion Agency and other government of Kenya agencies forms one of the bedrocks on which Kenya's participation in the AfCFTA pilot initiative rests.
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Other African countries like Zambia, Namibia, Malawi and Ghana are in advanced implementation stages of both the AfCFTA guided pilot and AfCFTA Hub platform implementation.
A subsidiary module of the platform to address the risks of market liberalisation for supply chains is the ProPer Seals system (www.properseals.org), designed to stop such vices as dumping, smuggling, counterfeiting and illicit trading that might flourish if adequate protections are not put in place.
The major components of the AfCFTA Hub platform include, in addition to the ProPer supply chain security system, e-logistics, a digital transactions marketplace, regulatory harmonisation, and a trade facilitation mechanism to minimize blockages in free and open trade technically referred to as "non-tariff barriers".
The AfCFTA provides the opportunity for Africa to create the world's largest free trade area with the potential to unite more than 1.2 billion people in an economic bloc with a gross domestic product valued at least $2.5 trillion and usher in a new era of development.
