Speaker Bagbin used a parliamentary forum in Marrakesh this week to repeat an argument he made in Accra last month: Africa needs broader partnerships, not deeper dependency.
The remarks came at the fourth Marrakesh Economic Parliamentary Forum, organised by the Parliamentary Assembly of the Mediterranean and the House of Councillors of the Kingdom of Morocco, held on June 19 and 20 in partnership with the Parliamentary Network on the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. Bagbin told delegates that regional blocs across Africa, the Euro Mediterranean zone and the Gulf risk becoming limiting structures if they keep deepening internal integration without connecting outward to each other.
He framed the goal as what he called “constructing formidable relationships” across regions for mutual economic gain, telling delegates that blocs should move beyond isolated regional economic systems and toward partnerships that expand opportunity on all sides.
Central to his pitch was Ghana’s own positioning. Bagbin pointed to the country’s location on the West African coast as a natural route to landlocked Sahelian states and global shipping lines, citing political stability, improving transport infrastructure and expanding port facilities at Tema and Takoradi as additional strengths. He linked these to the government’s industrialisation and export diversification push, including the planned 24-Hour Economy transition, as support for continuous production and trade facilitation.
Bagbin also outlined Ghana’s policy architecture for deeper trade integration: a dedicated AfCFTA policy framework and action plan, launched in 2022, that guides value addition to exports, capacity building against import competition and job creation tied to export growth, alongside the National Export Development Strategy aimed at tapping Africa’s market of more than 1.3 billion consumers.
The argument was not new. Less than a month earlier, in a keynote address read on his behalf at the Africa Future Leaders Institute of Global Affairs Fireside Dialogue in Accra on May 26, Bagbin made a closely related case: that Africa’s economic vulnerability stems partly from fragmentation, and that the continent gains more leverage through coordinated regional negotiation than countries acting alone. Both addresses tied that argument to AfCFTA implementation.
The Marrakesh forum’s four thematic panels covered public debt and trade barriers, investment in artificial intelligence and a proposed Euro Mediterranean and Gulf AI hub, job creation through regional incubators and the Blue Economy, and the effect of climate change on food security.
On the sidelines, Bagbin held bilateral meetings with his counterparts from the United Arab Emirates and Niger, and with the President of the Moroccan House of Councillors, meetings parliamentary officials linked to the same goal of building cross regional ties.
Whether that goal translates into concrete trade flows will depend less on forum speeches than on whether Ghana and its regional partners follow through on the policy architecture Bagbin described, the same test his AfCFTA argument has faced since the action plan launched four years ago.
