General Objectives of the Africa Continental Free Trade Area (Part 4 of 8)

Theme 3 – (Contribute to other Agenda 2063 Flagship Projects)

The African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement (AfCFTA) is not only an AU Agenda 2063 flagship project in its own right, but also contributes to other AU Agenda 2063 flagship projects.

Other Agenda 2063 Flagship Projects

Amongst the general objectives of the AfCFTA is the intent to contribute to the movement of capital and natural persons as well as to facilitate investments. These objectives are directly related and aligned to the African passport and free movement of people flagship project as well as the Continental financial institutions flagship projects.

For more on these flagship projects, you may want to visit our other publications i.e. Agenda 2063 flagship projects – lowering barriers to intra-African movement for more information on African Passport and free movement of people and Agenda 2063 flagship projects – Trade and Finance for more information on Continental Financial institutions flagship projects.

The Agenda 2063 flagship projects are not independent of each other. Expressions such as bringing African markets together, deepening economic integration and creating liberalised markets for goods and services can only succeed if it brings together amongst other things, human resources (people) and capital (finance). So the African passport and free movement of people and Continental financial institutions flagship projects will help remove the barriers to free movement and barriers to capital inflows. Furthermore, it will assist in expanding financial institutional mandates, revisiting policies and pieces of legislation and regulation that can negatively impact the free market for goods and services. 

To conclude the contribution to other flagship projects, we believe that other flagship projects can also contribute to the African Continental Free Trade Area Agreement considering that the ongoing implementation and execution of this Agreement is a real time ongoing project from which lessons can be drawn and these lessons can in turn be used to improve and refine the implementation and operations of other flagship projects.