The AfCFTA Country Business Index.

Since the private sector is directly involved in cross-border trade, it is a major stakeholder and beneficiary of the AfCFTA.

Thus, to better understand how African businesses are approaching the AfCFTA and, more importantly, how the AfCFTA can best support those businesses through trade, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) created the AfCFTA Country Business Index (ACBI).

The ACBI is a new AfCFTA-focused, ease-of-doing business index and is based on a robust theoretical framework and data collection process. It enables relevant policymakers to identify bottlenecks in intra-African trade at a country level, which informs the barriers impeding effective AfCFTA implementation from the perspective of the private sector.

It aims to inform African policymakers on the trade barriers and guide AfCFTA national strategies.

The ACBI aims to ensure that the African Continental Free Trade Area delivers on its projected sustainable development promises, especially for women-owned and small- and medium-sized businesses (SMEs).

The ACBI captures three dimensions relevant to the understanding of the AfCFTA and related negotiations:

The ease of trading goods across Africa;

Firm awareness and use of African free trade agreements (FTAs) and the AfCFTA;

Business environment related to trade in services, intra-African investment, intellectual property rights, and competition policy.

For a robust discussion of the ACBI's methodology, see the bottom of this blog.

Top ACBI findings: How do African businesses perceive trading within Africa?

The first round of the ACBI (which covered the seven countries of Angola, Cote d'Ivoire, Gabon, Kenya, Nigeria, Namibia, and South Africa) reveals several important trends in the understanding and utilization of the AfCFTA by African businesses. Here are the key findings:

Overall, the businesses surveyed reported feeling neutral toward their country's environment for trading and investing goods across African borders, i.e., on average, firms feel neither positive nor negative on the ease of doing business within Africa (Figure 1).

Given that these seven member states have deposited their instruments of AfCFTA ratification, the bottleneck seems not to be on the legal side, but rather in the lack of enterprise support for identifying strategic interests and market opportunities to ensure that the private sector can fully benefit from the AfCFTA.

Notably, the survey also reveals that perceptions related to trade...