The African Continental Free Trade Area: A Historical Moment for Development in Africa

Abstract

This achievement crowns a vision of continental trade integration that is over 50 years old (Gérout et al., 2019).In 1963, the Summit Conference of Independent African States, the inaugural meeting of the Organization of African Unity, appointed a 'preparatory economic committee to study … the possibility of establishing a free trade area between the various African countries' . 2 Previous continental integration attempts have all failed, however.Surveying the missed opportunities of African integration among the economic crises of the 1980s, Adebayo Adedeji lamented that 'when a state finds itself in a crisis, it does not see beyond its nose' (Adedeji, 2002).It is all the more commendable therefore that the African continent achieved the official commencement of trading under the AfCFTA less than 10 months after the World Health Organization declared the Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) a pandemic, a blight on global development and prosperity that will be remembered for centuries.3 It is no under-estimation to say that ECA has been one of the foundational proponents and supporters of the AfCFTA, and African economic integration in general, going back to the very first meetings of ECA in the late 1950s.Under the leadership of Adebayo Adedeji, from 1975, ECA proactively led in initiatives such as the Lagos Plan of Action and the establishment of the RECs (Gérout et al., 2019).ECA research on the rationale for a continental trade agreement in 2010 foreshadowed the AU's Boosting Intra-African Trade Action Plan in 2012 that formally envisaged for the first time a 'continental free trade area' .4 A centre-piece of the intellectual groundwork contributed to integration by ECA has been the Assessing Regional Integration in Africa (ARIA) report series, produced in partnership with the AU and African Development Bank (AfDB) since 2004.The ARIA series have

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