AfCFTA implementation at five — what Wamkele Mene's secretariat is actually doing
Wamkele Mene, the AfCFTA secretariat's secretary-general, and Carlos Lopes at the University of Cape Town's Mandela School have written the clearest accounts of where the African Continental Free Trade Area has actually moved since 2021. The progress is real, slower than billed, and structurally constrained by infrastructure rather than tariffs.
Key fact
AfCFTA Guided Trade Initiative shipments since 2022: 31 products, 8 countries, no reliable trade-volume figure yet (AfCFTA Secretariat, 2024).
The African Continental Free Trade Area entered force in May 2019 with 54 of 55 African Union member states acceding. Trading under AfCFTA's preferential tariff schedule officially began in January 2021. Wamkele Mene, as the first secretary-general of the AfCFTA Secretariat in Accra, has been the most consistent public voice on the program's progress. Carlos Lopes, the former UN Economic Commission for Africa executive secretary and now professor at the University of Cape Town's Nelson Mandela School of Public Governance, has provided the most rigorous academic accounting.
What has happened on tariffs: 45 of 54 acceding states have submitted tariff offers; the schedules cover roughly 90% of tariff lines for liberalisation over five to ten years. The remaining 10% is the politically sensitive list — agricultural products, textiles, light manufacturing — where domestic industries pushed back.
What has not happened, and is the binding constraint Lopes emphasises: cross-border infrastructure. Intra-African trade remains around 15% of total African trade, compared to 60% intra-EU and 50% intra-Asian. The single biggest reason is not tariffs (which were already low on many intra-African lanes); it is transport cost. Moving a container from Mombasa to Kigali is more expensive than moving it from Mombasa to Rotterdam. The Trans-African Highway network is incomplete; rail interoperability is essentially absent; intra-continental shipping services are thin.
Mene's Guided Trade Initiative, launched in October 2022, was designed to demonstrate operationalisation: a small pilot of 31 products being traded under AfCFTA preferences across eight countries. The pilot has been useful as proof-of-concept and honest about its scale — it is a pilot, not a transformation.
Lopes' framing in his 2023 essays is that AfCFTA is a fifteen-to-twenty-year project whose first decade is about harmonising the legal architecture, building customs and origin-of-rules capacity, and starting on infrastructure. The second decade is where measurable trade growth would show up if the first decade succeeds. The framing rejects both the celebratory and the dismissive readings of where AfCFTA stands in 2026.
Wamkele Mene became the inaugural Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat in March 2020 and has held the position through the five-year implementation window covered by this scorecard. The secretariat, based in Accra and operating under African Union auspices, has had to build itself as an institution while simultaneously running the technical negotiations that translate the framework agreement into the schedules, rules, and protocols under which intra-African trade actually moves.
The tariff-offer track is the most technically demanding line of work. The agreement commits member states to liberalising 90% of tariff lines on a Most-Favoured-Nation basis, with 7% covered by the sensitive-products carve-out (longer phase-in schedules) and 3% by the excluded-products category. Negotiating each member state's specific tariff offer requires reconciling the country's existing trade dependencies with the obligation to phase down preferences, plus aligning the offer with the country's existing regional-economic-community commitments (ECOWAS, EAC, SADC, COMESA, IGAD). By end-2024, approximately 90% of the participating member states had submitted offers that the secretariat had verified against the liberalisation requirements.
The Rules of Origin protocol is the second technical track. Rules of Origin determine which goods qualify as African-originating and therefore eligible for AfCFTA preferential treatment, versus goods that are merely transshipped through an African port. The protocol, finalised in 2023, sets product-specific criteria — value-added thresholds, change-in-tariff-heading requirements, specific processing operations — that operationalise the substantive originating-goods test. The secretariat has trained customs administrations across the participating states on the protocol's application, with uneven results; the African Union Border Management Programme is the parallel track that addresses the broader customs-modernisation challenge that the protocol's effective implementation depends on.
The Guided Trade Initiative is the operational pilot under which AfCFTA-preferential trade has begun moving. Launched in October 2022 with eight founding country-pairs (Cameroon, Egypt, Ghana, Kenya, Mauritius, Rwanda, Tanzania, Tunisia) and a constrained list of product categories, the GTI has expanded through 2024 to cover more bilateral lanes and a broader product range. The transaction volumes remain small in continental-trade terms but are not negligible for the specific corridors involved: Kenyan tea exports to Algerian and Egyptian markets, Ghanaian processed foods to East and Southern African destinations, Rwandan textiles to West African markets, Mauritian sugar to multiple destinations.
The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, PAPSS, operated by African Export-Import Bank (Afreximbank) under the AfCFTA institutional umbrella, is the financial-infrastructure complement to the trade-protocol work. PAPSS allows commercial banks in participating central-bank systems to settle intra-African transactions in local currencies, with PAPSS handling the cross-currency clearing through central-bank correspondents rather than through US-dollar correspondent banks based in New York or London. By 2024 PAPSS had onboarded central banks from 14 countries (West African Monetary Zone members, Kenya, Egypt, Zambia, Zimbabwe, and others). Transaction volumes remain modest but growing.
Mene's secretariat has also taken on the negotiating workstreams that the original AfCFTA framework deferred — investment, intellectual property, digital trade, women and youth in trade. Each is at a different stage of negotiation, and each demands the same coordination across 54 participating states (54 African Union members minus Eritrea, plus a status for Western Sahara as Sahrawi Arab Democratic Republic) that the core trade protocols required. The institutional bandwidth constraint is real and is what makes Carlos Lopes's framing — that the AfCFTA's measurable effects will compound over the second decade rather than the first — broadly correct. The first five years built the architecture. The second decade will run it.
The forward-looking implication of this analysis is that the structural drivers identified above will continue to shape policy trajectories across the second half of the 2020s. The doctrinal frameworks, institutional arrangements, and bilateral relationships described in the preceding sections are durable across multiple electoral cycles in the participating capitals, and any disruption of them would require shifts in underlying interests rather than rhetorical adjustment. The analytical reading developed here is not a prediction of a specific outcome at a specific date. It is a framework for reading the next round of developments — the summits, the policy announcements, the data releases, the bilateral and multilateral diplomatic moves — against the structural constraints the framework identifies. Each subsequent development can be read as confirming or refining the framework's predictions, and the cumulative pattern across multiple developments is what produces the analytical clarity that policy work most often needs. The headline-driven coverage of any specific event will continue to misread the broader trajectory; the data-driven, frame-anchored reading developed here is the antidote to that misreading and is the analytical discipline the policy community most needs across the remainder of the decade. The arithmetic of the underlying interests does not change quickly. The political and rhetorical surface above the arithmetic does change, sometimes quickly, and reading the two together is what produces analytical durability and policy-relevant insight that survives the news cycle.
The institutional research that underwrites this reading — the policy papers, the journal articles, the open-source datasets, and the running track records of the named scholars — represents a body of work substantially larger than any single explainer can summarise. Readers seeking deeper engagement should consult the primary sources cited in the preceding sections directly. The reading developed here aims to be a useful entry point rather than a substitute for that primary literature, and the framing has been chosen to surface the analytical moves that carry the most explanatory weight across the largest set of subsequent developments. A reader returning to this material in a year, in three years, or in five years should still find the framework usable, because the structural relationships it describes change more slowly than the headline developments they organise. The decade ahead will produce many specific events that this analysis cannot anticipate. The framework, if it is the right one, will help organise those events as they arrive.