Africa’s Trade Pact Needs Accountability, Not More Coordination

By Danilo Desiderio

Africa has signed the agreement, drafted the strategies and built the institutions. The harder question is whether any of it is changing how business gets done. Early evidence suggests a widening gap between promise and practice. Preliminary findings from the PAFTRAC 2026 Africa CEO Trade Survey point to a disconnect between what governments have committed to under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and what firms experience at the border, in the warehouse and on the balance sheet.

Closing that gap takes more than political will or polite coordination. It takes machinery that can track progress, expose obstacles and make sure someone fixes them. National AfCFTA Implementation Committees (NICs) were meant to be part of that machinery. Whether they are is now the question.

How the Committees Came to Be

The NICs trace their origins to a decision by the African Union Assembly at its 31st Ordinary Session in Nouakchott, Mauritania, in July 2018. Member states were asked to set up national committees on the AfCFTA, to give stakeholders a meaningful voice and to develop national AfCFTA and Boosting Intra-African Trade strategies. Monitoring implementation has since come to be seen as a core job of any effective committee.

In practice, the record is mixed. A 2023 joint study by the AfCFTA Secretariat and ODI, a London-based think-tank, found a gap between institutional design and implementation practice. Its review of five countries uncovered wide variation in how NICs were structured and how far they had developed. More recent assessments of Egypt and Mozambique stress the same lessons: structured coordination, systematic tracking and sustained follow-up.

The worry that emerges is a pointed one. NICs may function mainly as talking shops for stakeholders, sometimes duplicating the work of National Trade Facilitation Committees, without checking whether AfCFTA commitments are being met or whether trade obstacles are being cleared.

Meetings Are Not Results

The distinction matters. Gathering the right people in a room is necessary, but it is not progress. A committee can hold meetings, form working groups and file activity reports without removing a single significant barrier to trade. It can oversee a national strategy without ever establishing whether its commitments were fulfilled, or whether firms find the AfCFTA any easier to use. The danger is that NICs become fixtures of the agreement’s institutional architecture without becoming instruments for delivering it.

African governments do need coordination platforms; nobody disputes that. The real test is whether those platforms can graduate from convening to accountability: tracking commitments, identifying gaps and ensuring that agreed actions produce tangible results. Without that, NICs risk becoming one more layer of administration that supervises a process without measuring its outcome.

Why Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning Matters

This is where monitoring, evaluation and learning (MEL) comes in. ODI’s work on Mozambique is instructive, because it explores how AfCFTA implementation duties might be folded into existing institutions while still building in serious monitoring.

A sound MEL framework offers a disciplined way to follow implementation, judge what is working and what is not, and adjust accordingly. It spells out indicators, baselines, targets, data sources, reporting intervals and who is responsible for what. Regular reviews should then answer four plain questions. Which commitments have been met? Which obstacles persist? Why has progress stalled? What happens next?

Beware the Bureaucracy of Accountability

Yet a framework is only as useful as the decisions it informs. Indicators, templates and periodic reviews can themselves curdle into bureaucratic ritual if their findings never shape what happens next. The point of MEL is not to generate more paperwork. It is to link evidence to decisions, assign responsibility for unresolved problems and test whether corrective measures actually work.

By that standard, NICs should be judged on whether they narrow the distance between national commitments and real implementation. That means showing what has been done and which trade barriers have come down, and also being candid about where progress has stalled and what is needed to unstick it. Their worth lies not in the coordination they enable but in the results they help produce.

The Verdict that Matters

Continental integration cannot be measured by the commitments countries make or the committees they create. It must be measured by what changes in the conditions under which trade actually happens. The AfCFTA will not be judged by the institutions Africa has built to carry it out, but by the economic activity those institutions make possible.

A committee that cannot tell commitments adopted from commitments delivered risks becoming a custodian of the AfCFTA’s ambitions rather than an agent of its implementation. Africa’s businesses are waiting for the latter.

Danilo Desiderio serves as the CEO of Desiderio Consultants Ltd in Nairobi, Kenya, specializing in African customs, trade, and transport policies and is a Senior Research Associate to the Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute (HESPI).