The Head of Division-Rules of Origin at the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCFTA), Secretariat, Mr Didier Bronyeme, has called for strengthened public-private partnership to enable African countries to trade among themselves without any challenges.
“We need customs, commitment, support from all Africans to make it possible to achieve a successful result when it comes to trade,” he said.
He was speaking in Accra yesterday during a Public-Private dialogue on the Guided Trade Initiative.
It was organised by GIZ Programme Support, in collaboration with AfCFTA Secretariat and CUTS International, to diagnose the Guided Trade Initiative (GTI) and also to identify gaps and suggest measures needed to address those gaps.
The dialogue initiative is being organised to assess some of the complementary initiatives that had been launched to promote the operationalisation and implementation of the AfCFTA.
He said there was the need to put AfCFTA in focus through dialogues to bring out structured diagnosis of problems, knowledge sharing on best practices and success stories, whilst providing the much-needed feedback and recommendations to policy makers.
This, he said would enable duty bearers to help provide the needed accelerated implementation of the AfCFTA.
The West African Regional Director, CUTS, Mr Appiah Kusi Adomako, said the objective of the trade initiative was to ensure that AfCFTA was truly operational, and the gains from the initiative were improved implementation.
This, he said would help achieve an increased inter-regional and intra-Africa trade that would yield economic development for the betterment of the continent at large.
According to Mr Adomako, it also sought to engage relevant stakeholders to review or take stock of the GTI with the express purpose of shaping the initiative towards a full implementation of the AfCFTA.
“The overall objective of the dialogue is to review the GTI in line with the success stories, the challenges involved and the way forward as year 2023 has been declared Acceleration of AfCFTA Implementation,” he said.
He said the dialogue would enable stakeholders to examine the efficiency of the legal framework of the AfCFTA instruments and also exchange of different perspectives to identify the obstacles faced by the Ghanaian private sector as far as the GTI was concerned.
“This initiative would help identify possible future interventions to increase intra-African trade and maximise the benefits of the AfCFTA and examine the readiness of the private sector to participate in trade under the AfCFTA,” he said.
BY AGNES OPOKU SARPONG.