In 2017, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) released statistics that showed that the share of total exports from intra-African countries was 16.6%; for context, shares from Europe were 68.1%. This low percentage showed the need for new measures to expand intra-continental trade in Africa.
In 2019, the African Union adopted the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (‘AfCFTA’ or ‘the Agreement’) and trading under the Agreement commenced on 1st January 2021. Fifty-four African countries are now signatories to the Agreement, and forty-eightcountries have ratified it. Given this, the AfCFTA is the largest Free Trade Agreement in the world, with its goal targeted at makingAfrica a coherent, industrialised, contemporary, and powerful force inthe world arena.