The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) secretariat has launched two major tools which it sees as key in accelerating trading under the AfCFTA Agreement, one of the world’s largest free trade agreements (FTAs).
By eliminating barriers to trade between its members, the objective of the AfCFTA is to significantly boost intra-Africa trade, particularly trade in value-added production and trade across all sectors of continent’s economy. See https://au-afcfta.org for more details.
The E-Tariff Book and Rules of Origin Manual have both been developed with the support of the World Customs Organisation (WCO) and the European Union under the EU-WCO HS and RoO Africa programmes.
The e-Tariff Book contains all the information on tariff schedules and applicable tariff rates for all of the AfCFTA State Parties structured based on the WCO 6 digits Harmonised System (HS).
This tool is seen as a milestone as it will facilitate the publication of information on rates of duty applied by AfCFTA State Parties under their Schedules of Tariff Concessions with several search functionalities, comparison of applicable rates between all state parties and option to download the results, hence making it a practical instrument for trading under the AfCFTA Agreement.
The Rules of Origin Manual has been described as “the dashboard for the operationalisation of Annex 2 on Rules of Origin” in order to provide tariff preferences to goods that meet the origin rules and are traded between the AfCFTA State Parties.
