AfCFTA: Nigeria, Rwanda, Cote d’Ivoire to pilot Afreximbank, ITC SMEs training for intra-African trade
Continent’s intra-trade lags at 15%, against Europe’s 70%
NIGERIA, WITH 41.5 MILLION enterprises of which 99.8 per cent or 41.4 million are microenterprises spread across its 36 states (according to National Bureau of Statistics), is to lead Rwanda and Côte d’Ivoire in a pilot training of small business owners (under small and medium-scale enterprises, SMEs) and young entrepreneurs in Africa to trade with other African countries as part of the new African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
The training will give business owners the knowledge and skills they need to engage effectively in crossborder trade under terms of the emerging free-trade area for Africa.
The novel capacity buildup titled, “How to Export within the AfCFTA”, would be undertaken by the Afreximbank, a pan-African multilateral financial institution with the mandate of financing and promoting intra-and extra-African trade, in partnership with the International Trade Centre (ITC), a joint agency of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) and the United Nations, which assists SMEs in developing and transition economies to become more competitive in global markets.
Intra-African trade is currently structurally low at 15 per cent compared to Europe at nearly 70 percent. The AfCFTA, which formal launching last month was put off due to the coronavirus pandemic, is aimed to open an African market of over 1.2 billion people.
Checks by Business A.M. indicate that the International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) sub-Saharan Africa regional office said Africa’s formal SME sector has an annual financing gap of over $136 billion, whereas SMEs account for 90 percent of all businesses in Africa.
Afreximbank says the training programme, which will be piloted in Nigeria, Rwanda and Cote d’Ivoire, is being launched as the new free-trade area comes on stream and amid the economic strain of climate change and the coronavirus pandemic.
Kanayo Awani, managing director of Afreximbank’s Intra-African Trade Initiative, said that the initiative was necessary because increasing intra-African trade through exports of goods and services by small and medium-sized enterprises was the cornerstone of the
AfCFTA.
“It signals an optimal strategy to aid businesses and develop regional value chains, which have become more relevant with the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic,” she said.
Awani added that Afreximbank’s joint initiative with ITC is a proactive way to support the implementation of the AfCFTA, and to provide SMEs with the tools to respond more effectively to the economic and social challenges presented by the global pandemic.
The training would be run via ITC’s popular multilingual SME Trade Academy platform, under the auspices of the Afreximbank Academy (AFRACAD), and be launched in close collaboration with trade promotion organizations of the three selected pilot countries.
Dorothy Tembo, ITC’s acting executive director said “against the backdrop of the current COVID-19 health and economic crisis, African micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) need support to take full advantage of the continental market.”
She said, through the partnership, African businesses will have the opportunity to learn, plan and succeed in growing their business by taking full advantage of the AfCFTA.”