Gabonese entrepreneurs pressed AfCFTA officials in Libreville this week on how the continental trade deal actually works in practice, beyond the policy language member states have already signed.
The public-private dialogue, held at the newly renovated Palais des Congrès Omar Bongo Ondimba, opened with Gabon’s Minister of Entrepreneurship, Trade and SMEs, Zenaba Gninga Channing, framing the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) as a structural shift for the country away from raw commodity exports toward higher value sectors including agro-processing, timber transformation, construction materials, logistics and green enterprises. The session brought together private operators, government officials and AfCFTA technical experts, and moved quickly from policy presentation into the operational constraints businesses actually face.
Secretariat officials walked through the agreement’s core mechanisms, the rules of origin frameworks that determine which goods qualify for preferential access, the AfCFTA e-Tariff Book, and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS). PAPSS, developed with Afreximbank and adopted by the African Union as the settlement platform underpinning AfCFTA, is paired with a 10 billion dollar Adjustment Fund meant to cushion member states through implementation. Officials also outlined the safeguards built into the agreement, including infant industry protections, competition policy tools and trade defence measures against dumping, all of which member states activate through their own national institutions rather than having imposed from outside.
That explanation ran into the practical questions entrepreneurs actually had. Business leaders raised access to finance, logistics bottlenecks, competitiveness gaps and unfamiliarity with the rules of origin documentation required to actually claim preferential treatment, the kind of paperwork and compliance capacity that determines whether a company can use the agreement at all rather than simply qualify for it on paper.
The dialogue followed AfCFTA Secretary-General Wamkele Mene’s meeting a day earlier with Gabon’s Vice President Hermann Immongault, where talks centred on the Nkok Special Economic Zone and the sectors, pharmaceuticals, vehicle components, timber processing and agribusiness, where officials see Gabon’s strongest near term prospects. Mene described the trade area as a strategic option for African economies navigating a shifting global trade environment, offering a source of resilience less dependent on external trade systems.
The session also intersects with reforms still being negotiated continent wide, including efforts to simplify local content requirements under the rules of origin and build a unified cross-border competition policy, work that remains unfinished even as countries like Gabon try to operate within the existing framework. Officials closed by stressing the agreement’s stakes for younger entrepreneurs specifically, framing AfCFTA as a vehicle for a new generation able to trade across African borders. For Gabonese businesses, the dialogue left both sides of that promise on the table, a market of 1.4 billion consumers within reach in principle, and a set of financing, logistics and compliance barriers still standing between that promise and any company’s ability to actually use it.
