Africa's Free Trade Area Moves $220 Billion — But Only Half the Continent Can Actually Use It

Intra-African trade under the African Continental Free Trade Area reached roughly $220 billion in 2025, and the African Union is forecasting $230 billion for 2026. Those numbers get cited as proof that Africa's decade-old free trade project is working. What gets left out of that framing is that only 25 of the AU's 54 member states have actually gazetted the tariff-reduction schedules that let a business claim AfCFTA's preferential duties at the border. The other 29 are, in practical trading terms, still outside the system they've signed onto.

Ratifying a treaty and operating inside it are two different things

Fifty of 54 AU members have ratified the AfCFTA agreement itself — a near-complete membership on paper. Benin, Libya, South Sudan, and Sudan have not; Somalia has approved but not finished the paperwork. But ratification only commits a country to the treaty. It doesn't, on its own, cut a single tariff. That requires a second, separate step — gazetting a national tariff-reduction schedule, the legal instrument that actually tells customs officials which goods get preferential treatment and by how much. Only 25 countries have done that. The gap between those two numbers, 50 and 25, is the real state of AfCFTA in 2026: a continent that has mostly agreed to trade freely, and a much smaller group that has actually built the machinery to do it.

What gazetting is worth, in one country's numbers

Nigeria gazetted its tariff schedule in April 2025. In the following reporting period, its intra-African trade rose 21%, even though its exports remain heavily concentrated in a narrow set of commodities — cocoa alone accounts for roughly 35% of its non-oil exports to the continent. South Africa and Kenya, both gazetted, show a similar pattern from a stronger base: South Africa trades a more diversified basket of machinery and vehicles across the continent, and Kenya sent 41% of its first-quarter 2026 merchandise exports elsewhere in Africa. None of that access exists for a country that has ratified the treaty but never gazetted its own schedule — its exporters are legally part of AfCFTA and commercially locked out of the preferences it's supposed to unlock.

The workaround for the countries still catching up

The AfCFTA Secretariat, led by Secretary-General Wamkele Mene, has been publicly pushing the holdouts to close this gap — in March, Mene pressed the Central African Republic specifically to complete its tariff gazetting for full market access, one of several such interventions this year. In the meantime, the Secretariat's Guided Trade Initiative functions as a narrower fast lane: it launched with 7 countries — Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda, and Tanzania — and has since expanded to 9 with the addition of Tunisia and Algeria, letting a smaller group trade under AfCFTA terms on a pilot basis while the gazetting process catches up elsewhere. The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, the infrastructure meant to let businesses settle those trades in local currencies rather than routing through dollars, now connects 28 countries — its own number, sitting between the 25 that can price preferential trade and the 50 that have merely signed on to eventually.

What the $220 billion figure actually measures

None of this makes AfCFTA's headline trade numbers false. It means those numbers are currently a measure of what 25 countries can do, not what 54 have committed to. The African Union's own target — 25% of the continent's total trade happening within Africa, roughly double today's 15-16% share — depends on closing the gap between ratification and gazetting, not on adding more signatures to a treaty most of the continent has already signed.

What to watch next

The number worth tracking through the rest of 2026 isn't the trade total — it's whether the count of gazetted countries moves past 25. Every country that finishes that step adds real, usable market access; every country that stops at ratification adds only to a membership figure that, on its own, moves no goods across any border.

Sources

• African Union Trade Deal Tops $220 Billion as AfCFTA Tariffs Cover Just 25 Countries, Rio Times Online, (September 2026)
• AfCFTA at Five: The $3.4 Trillion Market Africa Still Won't Trade In, Nairametrics, (September 8, 2026)
• AfCFTA Secretary-General urges Central African Republic to complete tariff gazetting for full market access, The Business & Financial Times, (March 5, 2026)

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