Ghana African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) December 2025 Update

The potential for the AfCFTA to transform fractionalized and smaller African markets into a single market for goods and services covering 54 countries with a combined GDP of more than $3.4 trillion remains a tantalizing prospect for companies with a commercial interest in Africa.  

Fifty-four countries signed the baseline AfCFTA agreement in 2019, including all of Sub-Saharan Africa and North Africa except Eritrea.  Somalia’s ratification of that agreement on October 20, 2025, brings the total number of State Parties that have ratified the agreement to 50.  Benin, Libya, South Sudan, and Sudan still have not ratified it.  

However, for tariff reductions to take place and the resulting trade in goods to flow, State Parties have to take a second step.  They need to finalize negotiations with other State Parties on their Schedules of Tariff Concessions, which outline how they will eliminate or reduce duties on qualified goods from other countries.  The AfCFTA Secretariat must approve those schedules, and the State Parties must incorporate them into domestic law and publish them.  Twenty-five countries have now completed that process: Algeria, Burundi, Botswana, Cameroon, Egypt, Eswatini, Ethiopia, the Gambia, Ghana, Kenya, Lesotho, Malawi, Mauritius, Morocco, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, Rwanda, Seychelles, South Africa, South Sudan, Tanzania, Tunisia, Uganda, and Zambia.  With the addition of Nigeria and South Africa in 2024 this group now includes the largest markets in Africa.

This is significant progress from October 2022, when the AfCFTA Secretariat launched the Guided Trade Initiative (GTI), which the Secretariat has since phased out, to facilitate trade among eight countries: Ghana, Kenya, Rwanda, Cameroon, Egypt, Mauritius, Tanzania, and Tunisia. That temporary pilot initiative had helped individual shipments overcome operational bottlenecks, including rules-of-origin compliance, customs procedures, payment systems, and shipping logistics.

AfCFTA State Parties are still implementing staged tariff reductions to zero in most cases, and they have not yet agreed on final terms for rules of origin for important categories of goods, such as autos and textiles/apparel.  Nonetheless, trade patterns are starting to emerge, with countries such as South Africa and Egypt, which have large industrial and agricultural capacities, logging the most certificates of origin for shipping goods under the AfCFTA so far.

The U.S. Embassy in Ghana at email: office.accra@trade.gov and telephone: +233(0)30-274-1870 can assist U.S. companies to do business in Ghana and understand developments related to the AfCFTA, including the commercial opportunities it creates.