Global Concept Note
In Focus
In case you missed it:
- Relive the actions during the High-level Policy Dialogue at the Africa Dialogue Series 2023, focusing on each sub-theme: ; Growing Middle Class and Continental Import Substitution: Connecting the Dots to Unlock Made in Africa; and Digital Services Trade: Great Potential but Regulatory Frameworks Are Urgent.
- Read the statement of the United Nations Secretary-General at the High-level Policy Dialogue.
- The agreement establishing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), one of the world’s largest free trade areas (1.3 billion people), was signed in 2018, ratified in 2019, and officially launched in 2021. The AfCFTA creates a single market within the continent with the potential to unlock regional, local, and global value chains. As of November 2022, 54 out of 55 African Union (AU) member States had signed the AfCFTA, and 44 had deposited their instruments of ratification.1
- According to the World Bank, the gradual elimination of tariffs on 90 percent of goods and reduced barriers to trade in services could raise income by 7 percent, or $450 billion, by 2035, reducing the number of people living in extreme poverty by 30 million and lifting another 68 million people from moderate poverty.2 In effect, the AfCFTA is a commitment to a socioeconomic structural transformation by enabling trade, investment, and industrialization. It is expected that the AfCFTA will contribute to the creation of decent jobs for Africa’s youth and increase income for all households.
- Objectives of the AfCFTA include the creation of a single regional market for goods and services, facilitated by the movement of persons in order to deepen the economic integration of the African continent and in accordance with the Pan-African Vision of “an integrated, prosperous, and peaceful Africa” enshrined in Agenda 2063; the creation of a liberalized market for goods and services through successive rounds of negotiations; the promotion and attainment of sustainable and inclusive socioeconomic development, gender equality and structural transformation of the State Parties; and promotion of industrial development through diversification and regional value chain development, agricultural development and food security.
- The AfCFTA is not only about trade but will also facilitate the full implementation of the priorities articulated in Agenda 2063 “The Africa We Want”. Juxtaposed with the Fourth Industrial Revolution, it will increase job opportunities for Africa’s youthful and innovative population, and growing middle class. Prospectively, intra-regional trade will increase economies of scale, value addition, and diversification. In fact, the AU theme of the year for 2023 seeks to generate greater political commitment with trade as a developmental Agenda for Africa.
- Member States must accelerate implementation by focusing on trade facilitation and narrowing the infrastructure deficit – including roads, seaports, airports, and digital communication. A key priority driving the continent’s industrialization potential is its ability to address energy challenges. According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), Africa has 54 percent of the world’s renewable energy, including solar, hydro, and geothermal energy sources. The continent also has around 13 percent of the world's natural gas reserves, estimated at over 620 trillion cubic feet as of 2021; however, it also has the world's lowest per capita energy use3. Renewable energy is part of the solution to achieve universal electricity access in Africa. At the same time, the International Renewable Energy Agency’s (IRENA) assessment states that just 2.4 percent ($55 billion) of global investment in renewable energy between 2010 and 2020 was in Africa, which pales compared to what is needed. Integrating renewables into Africa’s energy systems, as part of a balanced energy mix, would maximize efficiency, where base loads needed for energy-intensive applications such as industry will be covered by traditional grids and transition fuels. At the same time, renewables would need to take on critical sections such as rural, hard-to-reach and urban household consumptions, which are not as energy intensive and have room for intermittency.
- The AfCFTA’s economic benefits will be centred on intra-Africa trade. The AfCFTA is an opportunity to deepen continental, regional, and market integration, promote regional value chains and boost intra-African trade. Moreover, improving intra-regional trade will improve Africa’s resilience to external shocks such as COVID-19, as this will reduce dependency on imports from other regions. A recent OSAA advocacy brief, dated 2022, highlights that intra-African trade increased to 16.1 percent of total African trade in 2018, up from 15.5 percent in 20174. The AfCFTA has the potential to increase this number up to 33 percent. UNECA estimates that the AfCFTA will increase intra-African trade by 15 to 25 percent, or $50 billion to $70 billion, by 2040.
- To effectively advance the implementation of the AfCFTA, Member States must deliberately embrace industrialization by focusing on increasing productive capacities in a competitive landscape. Commitments and strategies must focus on manufacturing to increase the production of value-added products and reduce trade imbalances. To this effect, the potential of light manufacturing will create millions of much-needed jobs in this sector. This must be accompanied by massive investment in the industrial ecosystem to substantively increase economies of scale, diversification and value addition. Equally importantly, Member States must match these aforementioned investments with targeted investments in their human capital to ensure that young people are ready for high-skill jobs in manufacturing, agriculture and infrastructure.
- Peace and stability will create the enabling environment for the successful implementation of AfCFTA priorities toward the key objectives articulated in the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the African Union’s Agenda 2063. By contrast, conflict and insecurity prohibit development integration by diverting resources away from development towards military purposes. Trade is the key to countering conflict and fragility in the continent; therefore, AfCFTA implementation will reduce conflicts by creating economic incentives for shared prosperity among African countries.
- To that end, making peace and security a public good must be an explicit target of African policymakers’ investments toward inclusive sustainable development for Africa. It is important to address peace and security in Africa in the context of AfCFTA – the conducive environment necessary to unlock the private sector’s potential to effectively drive Africa’s industrialization, economic diversification and prosperity.
- Looking ahead, the AfCFTA should develop a comprehensive protocol on digitalization that goes beyond e-commerce to include digital industrialization anchored in economic structural transformation and diversification. In this connection, the African Union launched the Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020 to 2030) to fast-track adaptation and implementation. The digital economy is a new opportunity for the AfCFTA to facilitate intra-African trade, smartphones, digital payments and electronic banking and increase e-commerce platforms. However, industrializing in the digital age will require good and reliable internet access, policy and regulatory frameworks, and digital skills. Moreover, Member States must embrace transformational change by strategically investing in innovation and technology as a smart way to redefine market integration.
- Structural transformation of African economies is the key to achieving diversification of economic activity and exports and thereby making the most out of the opportunities generated by the launch of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
- However, African economies start this journey from a low base: according to the 2022 issue of the UNCTAD (EDAR 2022, hereafter), Africa is the second least diversified region in the world after Oceania. UNCTAD classifies countries as commodity-dependent if the share of primary commodity exports to total merchandise exports exceeds 60 per cent. Based on this working definition of commodity dependence, 45 out of the 54 countries (or 83 per cent) in Africa are commodity dependent.
- There is a vast economic literature analyzing this issue under the term “Dutch Disease” or “Natural Resource Curse” that highlights the overwhelming empirical evidence of a negative correlation between the revenues from commodities and economic growth, making a strong case for economic diversification5. Although there is less agreement on the exact channels through which this effect materializes, commodity dependence is associated with excessive vulnerability to the boom-bust cycle and puts countries at the mercy of sharp market swings and sentiments. Furthermore, Africa’s dependence on external trade, predominantly through primary commodity exports, has weakened the continent’s resilience against macroeconomic shocks and protectionist trade policies. Promoting intra‐African trade is the key to rebuild this resilience to external shocks and improve terms of trade and diversification of African economies. Regional value chain development is critical to put Africa’s industrialization on strong footing.
- The necessity for economic diversification has also been well understood by African policymakers. However, according to UNCTAD staff calculations, in the early 2000s, some 31 African countries made progress in diversifying their economies, with an average improvement of 0.1186 points on the Theil index – a measure of export diversification (the higher the index, the less diverse the exports), yet this was more than offset by the reversal of this trend starting in the 2010s with an average increase of 0.18 on the same index6. This is largely attributed to two main factors: (i) the global economic and financial crisis, which dampened economic activity and trade at the beginning of the decade, and (ii) the increased demand for commodities due to the rapid industrialization drive of Asian economies.
- Furthermore, the limited diversification that was achieved in African economies fell short of what is needed to integrate these economies more upstream in global value chains (GVCs). Consequently, while some countries have managed to expand their export baskets with the addition of new products, insufficient progress has been made to divert industrial production towards manufactured goods with high value-added at the source.
- Recent research by UNCTAD also highlights that although achieving export diversification has been a major policy objective for African policymakers during the last couple of decades, the pivotal role of services has been largely overlooked. Consequently, services accounted for merely 17 per cent of Africa’s exports during the decade and a half from 2005 to 2019. Out of these exports, two-thirds were concentrated in traditional and relatively low value-added services, such as travel and transport7.
- This means that there is still tremendous untapped potential in Africa’s services sector to drive the economic diversification process. African policymakers could reverse decades of underinvestment and reap the low-lying fruits by focusing on the complementarities between the services and manufacturing sectors. The right mix of policy and regulation should focus on increasing the value-added from the service sector into the final manufactured goods and unlock the potential of African economies by gradually moving away from the exports of traditional services towards innovative and cutting-edge services in an ever-growing regional market thanks to AfCFTA implementation.
- To that effect, trade facilitation is the key to promoting transparent, predictable and straightforward measures to expedite the cross-border movement of goods and services by cutting costs and simplifying trade procedures. It rests on four core pillars: (i) transparency and accountability; (ii) simplification and elimination of duplicative processes; (iii) harmonization and alignment of national and regional policies; and (iv) standardization and sharing of best practices.8
- Trade facilitation measures address both demand and supply-side constraints, such as increasing costs due to non-tariff barriers, deficient infrastructure (physical and ICT), and excessive regulatory burden among others. All these measures seek to increase productive capacity in Africa to better leverage the AfCFTA implementation.
- Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) constitute the engine of African economies. Not only do they account for 90 per cent of the firms on the continent, but they also employ about 60 per cent of the continent’s workforce – fulfilling a crucial role in harnessing Africa’s demographic dividend. To build forward better in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic and address the numerous supply chain disruptions, especially in the food and energy sectors, brought about by the war in Ukraine, Africa has an enormous opportunity to leverage the dynamism and resilience of its SMEs.
- To unlock the potential of SMEs and to channel that potential towards diversification of Africa’s exports, policymakers should seek to enact reforms to strengthen institutions and transparency, which will in turn create an enabling business environment characterized by the rule of law and secure property rights. Such institutional reforms should also seek to harmonize legislation regionally and scrap regulatory arbitrage. These measures will in turn help formalize the informal economy, which accounted for 36 per cent of Africa’s GDP from 2010 to 2018, according to UNCTAD estimates.9
- According to International Finance Corporation (IFC) estimates, there are about 50 million formal micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) in Africa, with an annual financing need of $416 billion.10 If unmet, these financial constraints could significantly weigh down on sales, profit and growth potential of the "engine of African economies."
- By contrast, the enhanced market integration thanks to the AfCFTA implementation, and the consequent legal, regulatory and institutional harmonization supported by the flagship projects of the African Union’s Agenda 2063 on finance and trade facilitation as well as innovative partnerships, including those with the multilateral system, for exchange of know-how and capacity building, should be more than enough to turn these challenges into opportunities.
- Africa has one of the youngest and most dynamic populations in the world, with 70 per cent of the population below the age of 30 and women making significant contributions to cross-border trade in many African countries. A recent study by the IFC argues that women-led/owned MSMEs in Africa have been especially hit hard due to the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic due to their smaller size and market concentration.11
- Furthermore, African women and youth face additional challenges such as underemployment, lack of equal opportunities, and other structural and financial challenges that crowd them out of the marketplace. To make the most of the benefits from the AfCFTA through export diversification, African policymakers should also consider enacting targeted policies for breaking down regulatory barriers and ensuring fair and equitable market access to all groups, including women, youth and other vulnerable groups. In line with Aspirations 1 and 6 of Agenda 2063 and the African Women’s Decade on Financial Inclusion and Economic Inclusion 2020 to 2030, the AfCFTA should continue to promote an inclusive socioeconomic development of the continent anchored on its main strengths, namely its women and youth, through the AfCFTA Protocol on Women and Youth in Trade.
- In conclusion, the AfCFTA provides unprecedented opportunities for structural transformation and diversification of African economies. It allows for the challenge of small market size that characterizes most African economies to be overcome through regional integration and the pooling of resources. In the same vein, financial inclusion can be furthered by implementing policies that ensure equal access to finance, market access and other business services informed by gender-disaggregated data and explicit policy objectives to further women’s economic empowerment and financial inclusion.
- The AfCFTA offers an unprecedented opportunity for enhancing socioeconomic transformation that is underpinned by inclusive growth and poverty reduction. Through promoting economic diversification and competitiveness, and strengthening industrial development and productive capacity, the AfCFTA promises to foster inclusive growth, expand massive opportunities for economic participation, including for women and youth, and contribute to lifting millions of Africans out of poverty. Recent estimates by the World Bank indicate that the full implementation of the AfCFTA could bring income gains on the continent between 7 percent ($450 billion) and 9 percent ($571 billion) by 2035 – above the baseline without the AfCFTA – and could lift 50 million people out of extreme poverty.12
- To deliver this socioeconomic transformational impact, the AfCFTA is anchored in the political will and commitment of African leaders to fully harness the potential of regional economic integration and structural transformation towards achieving the aspirations of the “The Africa We Want” as encapsulated in Agenda 2063. Furthermore, despite the setbacks experienced by African economies due to the COVID-19 pandemic and the current global geopolitical situation, the remarkable development gains made by African countries over the past two decades provide a solid foundation for the successful implementation of the AfCFTA agreement. In addition, the continent’s economic, social and demographic potentials, notably its burgeoning youth population, growing middle class, and huge market provide a great impetus for seizing the opportunities offered by the AfCFTA. According to the World Social Report 2023, Africa has the potential to become a major engine of global economic growth if policies that realize the historic demographic dividend are adopted by African countries.13
- Furthermore, the continent’s growing middle class and their increasing purchasing power continue to fuel African economies and enhance domestic demand, thus contributing to boosting production, trade and investment, including import-substitution. The African Development Bank (AfDB) estimated that the number of middle-class Africans tripled between 1990 and 2010, reaching nearly 350 million, accounting for more than 34 percent of the continent’s population that year, and reflecting a growth rate of 3.1 percent in the middle-class population over the period 1980 to 2010, which was higher than the growth rate in the continent’s overall population of 2.6 per cent.14
- However, Africa’s middle class encompasses a significant population whose position in the middle class is insecure and vulnerable to shocks. The AfDB called them a “floating class whose hold in status is insecure,” with the robust and more stable part of the middle class estimated then at about 150 million people.15 Furthermore, despite the growing middle class in Africa, its growth rate and share of the population are still below the levels recorded in other regions. According to World Bank data, East Asia and the Pacific has made significant advances in reducing poverty and promoting the expansion of the middle class from less than 1 percent to almost one-fifth of the population between 1990 and 2015 and recorded a rapid increase in the population living between $5.50 and $15 to almost half of the population of the region. This has occurred while in Africa the declines in extreme poverty translated primarily into an expansion of the population living below $5.50, with the middle-class accounting for a negligible share of the regional population.16
- While the growing middle class in Africa is linked to the economic growth achieved in the continent over the past two decades, it is believed that the middle class is strongest in African countries with a robust private sector.17 It is estimated that the private sector contributes about 80 percent of the continent’s GDP and creates about 90 percent of all jobs. Micro, small, and medium enterprises, 65 percent of them informal, create 70–80 percent of jobs and contribute 30-35 percent of GDP.18 It is imperative to support micro, small, and medium enterprises and promote entrepreneurship, including by implementing measures targeting women and youth, and including capacity building and facilitating access to market and finance.19
- The structure of Africa’s trade with the world creates massive opportunities for promoting local and regional production and value chains to meet growing domestic demand and support more diversified exports. African merchandise exports reached $386 billion while imports stood at $509 billion in 2020, accounting for 2.19 percent and 2.85 percent of global total merchandise exports and imports, respectively.20 Africa’s trade performance still depends heavily on commodity price developments. Africa’s trade performance has been impacted by transaction cost increases and disruptions of global value chains due to the COVID-19 pandemic. According to UNECA figures, Africa’s exports and imports declined by 2.4 per cent and 1 per cent respectively between 2019 and 2021.21 UNIDO’s figures indicate that following the global decline in manufacturing registered due to the COVID-19 pandemic, manufacturing production in Africa saw a growth rate similar to the global average of 4.2 per cent during the first quarter of 2022.22
- Successful import substitution strategies, supported by a growing African middle class, can have a positive impact on the continent’s overall economic performance and macroeconomic indicators. Economic sectors where experts believe that the continent has great potential for industrialization and value addition that can support the implementation of successful import-substitution strategies include petroleum oils (with imports exceeding $55 billion), cereals ($22 billion), pharmaceuticals ($20 billion), wheat ($16 billion), animal vegetable fats ($11 billion) and fertilizers ($5 billion).23
- To that effect, strengthening the distributional impact of the AfCFTA, particularly through its impact on creating jobs and reducing poverty as well as boosting productivity and facilitating labour’s shift to more innovative and productive sectors, including manufacturing, is indispensable for the continuous growth of Africa’s middle class, whose growing demand for consumer goods will further boost investment, production, income, and growth, thus contributing to the attainment of the transformational outcomes envisaged in the AfCFTA implementation.24 It is equally important to address the high levels of informality and unemployment in the labour force, which continue to constrain industrialization in Africa. Creating meaningful jobs in the formal sectors that will contribute to manufacturing and value addition on the continent is therefore crucial for sustainable industrial development as well as for poverty reduction and the growth of the middle class.
- Above and beyond unlocking industrialization throughout Africa, a further area of commercial activity in Africa that stands to benefit from the full implementation of the AfCFTA is trade through digital services (e-commerce).
- Embedded within the vision of an integrated continent described in Aspiration 2 of the African Union Agenda 2063, African countries enshrined the goal of having the "necessary infrastructure … to support Africa’s accelerated integration and growth, technological transformation, trade, and development". This infrastructure was to include, inter alia, "well-developed ICT and the digital economy." Furthermore, Agenda 2063 expressed that infrastructure developments like ones supporting the digital economy would be "a catalyst for … integration and intra-African trade."
- African countries’ ambitions on digital services were subsequently further concretized with the elaboration of the African Union’s Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa (2020-2030). The Strategy set out parameters for a continental “robust digital market characterized by the increased quality of financial inclusion, fair competition and advanced consumer protection with main focus areas on digital trade and financial services.” E-commerce and digital financial inclusion would be key enablers towards establishing a digital single market, which would create significant opportunities and economies of scale to accelerate the growth of Africa’s economies. By serving as key inputs to production, services are an important component of regional and global value chains.
- The services sector presents an opportunity for African countries to diversify their exports in that the use of innovation and technology in the services sector can strengthen productive capacities, leading to high-quality and more diversified exports of goods. In addition, African countries can diversify exports by intensifying forward and backward linkages with services sectors and increasing the export of services.
- To have African countries diversify their economies, UNCTAD has urged these countries to boost exports of high-value services, expand private businesses’ access to financial services and tap into new financial technologies. Long dependent on the export of agricultural and extractive industry products, which leaves economies vulnerable to external shocks, African countries have tremendous potential to leverage digital services, within the framework of the AfCFTA, to boost services exports, ensure structural transformation and accelerate inclusive, sustainable development. Through digital transformation, supported by initiatives that aim to ease doing business, deepen domestic capital markets and crowd-in private capital, major strides can be made in unlocking the potential of financial services and intensifying the role of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) as a driver of export diversification.
- African e-commerce is growing rapidly, estimated at an annual growth rate of 18.07 per cent, which is projected to result in a market volume of $72 billion by 2025. The overall digital economy in Africa is expected to grow to over $300 billion by 2025, as a result of massive mobile penetration. To meet cross-border e-commerce needs, the Regional Economic Communities in Africa have been providing solutions through regional payments systems (such as the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa Regional Payment and Settlement System). At the continental level, Afreximbank has been developing a pan-African payments and settlement platform, which is expected to support cross-border payments in which sender and receiver transact in their local currency.
- Developments in the financial services sector in recent years – including the use of technology to strengthen financial access – offer an opportunity for African private sector firms to strengthen productive capacities, and to diversify products, including ones that require highly skilled labour and the use of innovation and technology. In this light, financial technology has the potential to improve exporting firms’ access to credit through, for instance, capital venture and private equity firms, business angels, and other private debt mechanisms, thereby raising the ability to increase the share of manufacturing relative to primary exports, leading to greater export diversification.
- Despite this progress, inadequate regulatory frameworks have impeded further acceleration. Much work needs to be done to develop the regulatory framework that would govern the digital single market in Africa. For instance, as it stands, a number of African countries still lack data protection legislation to regulate data privacy and protection at a national level. This regulatory framework would be aimed at solving issues such as cross-border tax obligations in conducting digital business and the removal of geographical blockades in digital goods and services.
- Although progress towards digitalization has been slow and uneven across economies in different development stages and across sectors, digital trade, and financial services markets are emerging in Africa. The debilitating effects of the pandemic have given new impetus to the digitalization of businesses through the adoption and increased use of emergent digital technologies, such as artificial intelligence, the internet of things, big data, and blockchain. These technologies do not exist in many African markets, but they have the potential to boost firm productivity, promote job creation, expand trade and competitiveness, and foster economic diversification.
- It has been noted that knowledge-intensive services, such as information technology and financial services, could be a game-changer for Africa. However, compared with other regions of the world, international trade in digitally deliverable services as a percentage of total trade in services is low in Africa at present. Still, growth can be seen: these services represented only 17.7 per cent of total trade in services in 2005, while rising to 21.6 per cent in 2013 and to 33.9 per cent in 2021 (40.5 per cent in the sub-Saharan Africa region in 2021).
- Going forward, an AfCFTA Protocol on E-Commerce is set to be negotiated during Phase III of AfCFTA negotiations. The negotiations present a unique opportunity for African countries to collectively establish common positions on e-commerce, harmonize digital economy regulations and leverage the benefits of e-commerce.
1. ?
2. Echandi, Roberto; Maliszewska, Maryla; Steenbergen, Victor. 2022. . Washington, DC: World Bank. ? World Bank. ?
3. and ?
4. Africa is delivering on the AfCFTA: Whoever thinks otherwise is wrong. 缅北禁地OSAA ?
5. See, for example, Hausmann, R., and R. Rigobon. 2003. ‘An Alternative Interpretation of the “Resource Curse”: Theory and Policy Implications’, in Fiscal Policy Formulation and Implementation in Oil-Producing Countries. Washington, DC: IMF press. For a comprehensive literature review on the topic, please see Mien, E., and M. Goujon, (2002) ‘40 Years of Dutch Disease Literature: Lessons for Developing Countries’. Comparative Economic Studies 64, 351–383. ?
6. Please see (2002), Chapter 1 for a more detailed discussion. UNCTAD calculates that in 2018-2019, only 6 countries scored below 4 in Thiel Index, which shows sufficient diversification in exports. The majority of the African economies scored between 4 and 7 and eleven countries scored above 7 showing relatively high concentration. ?
7. Ibid. ?
8. OECD (2018), “Trade Facilitation and the Global Economy”, Paris and UNECE (2012), “Trade Facilitation Implementation Guide”, Geneva. ?
9. Ibid. ?
10. International Finance Corporation, (2017) MSME Finance Gap: Assessment of the Shortfalls and Opportunities in Financing Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises in Emerging Markets. Washington, D.C. and UNCTAD calculations based on updated data 2018–2019. ?
11. IFC (2021), "COVID-19 and Women-led MSMEs in Sub-saharan Africa: Examining the Impact, Responses, and Solutions," Washington, D.C. ? 12. Making the Most of the African Continental Free Trade Area: Leveraging Trade and Foreign Direct Investment to Boost Growth and Reduce Poverty, World Bank, 2022 ?
13. World Social Report 2023: Leaving No One Behind In An Aging World, United Nations ?
14. , AfDB, 2011 ?
15. IMF Survey: Africa’s Middle Class Spearheads Economic Growth, 2013 ?
16. According to the World Bank, $1.90 is the international poverty line used to monitor the number of people living in extreme poverty in the world. $3.20 and $5.50 are higher poverty lines that reflect typical national poverty lines in lower- and upper-middle-income countries, respectively. $15 is used as a threshold to define the lower limit of the middle class. More details here: ?
17. ?
18. , AfDB ?
19. Reshaping the Potential Benefits of the African Continental Free Trade Area for Inclusive Growth, Economic Development in Africa Report 2021, UNCTAD ?
20. UNCTAD Handbook of Statistics, 2021 ?
21. ?
22. World Manufacturing Production, Quarter I 2022 Report, UNIDO ?
23. ?
24. Regional Integration and Poverty Reduction in the Horn of Africa: The AfCFTA Perspective, 2021 ? 25. A digital single market is a market characterized by ensuring the free movement of people, services and capital and allowing individuals and businesses to seamlessly access and engage in online activities irrespective of their nationality or place of residence. ?
26. In this connection, the AfCFTA Hub (), developed under the aegis of the African Union, aims to interconnect national, regional and private digital applications together to boost the ability of SMEs to expand their business or export their products across Africa through simplified organization of supplier networks and improved logistics. ?
27. UNCTAD Policy Brief No. 106: Financial services: Unlocking the potential for export diversification, December 2022 ?
28. Ibid. ?
29. Economic Development in Africa Report 2022, UNCTAD ?
30. Ibid. ?
31. Digital Economy Report 2021, UNCTAD ?
32. , Brian Maera, Tech Policy Fellow ?
33. Economic Development in Africa Report 2022, UNCTAD ?
34. UNCTADstat ?
35. Digital trade provisions in the AfCFTA: What can we learn from South–South trade agreements? UNECA, April 2021 ?