The Ghanaian government on Thursday called for the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) on shared production lines to achieve sustainable intra-continental trade that inures to the benefit of African citizens.
Ghana’s Trade, Agribusiness, and Industry Minister Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare said during the fifth joint meeting of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) Ministers of Trade and Industry (ECOMOTI-5) in Accra, the Ghanaian capital, that the export baskets dominated by raw commodities destined for markets outside the continent would not bring the transformation envisaged under AfCFTA.
Within the ECOWAS subregion, Ofosu-Adjare remarked that intra-regional trade in formal terms still hovers at roughly one tenth of its total trade because “we produce little that our neighbors buy and we buy little that our neighbors produce.”
The clearest path to making the AfCFTA real, she said, is “for us to work together to develop regional value chains, particularly in textiles, apparel, and the automotive sector, where our complementarities are strongest.”
In that regard, she said cotton grown in one country must be spun in another, finished in a third, and sold across the continent, while the rules of origin adopted reward precisely that kind of collaboration.
“Our positions must incentivize manufacturing on this continent, deepen the use of regional inputs, and make it genuinely worthwhile to produce together rather than to import from outside,” Ofosu-Adjare urged.
She added, “An AfCFTA built on shared production lines, not relabeled imports, is an AfCFTA that will endure.”
The minister pledged Ghana’s readiness to co-invest, co-produce, and co-open markets for regionally made goods, urging all ECOWAS member states to adopt the same spirit of partnership and urgency.
Kalilou Sylla, commissioner for Economic Affairs and Agriculture of the ECOWAS Commission, said that the member states have created a solid base for cooperation through trade agreements, a common tariff, free movement rules, and the West African Common Industrial Policy.
“The true measure of integration is how effectively we convert these commitments into tangible benefits for citizens, businesses, women traders, and young entrepreneurs across our region,” Sylla added.