Africa Trade Competitiveness and Market Access: A groundbreaking approach for employment and economic growth in Africa
The International Trade Centre (ITC) is working with UNIDO and African partners to increase sustainable intra-African and EU-Africa trade and fortify regional economic communities as building blocks of the African Continental Free Trade Area.
2025 is a milestone year for ITC as we embark on the implementation of a new umbrella programme in Africa, larger than any in ITC history. The Africa Trade Competitiveness and Market Access (ATCMA) programme will be improving the trade competitiveness of African small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and their market access to the African region and the EU.
Its innovative design allows this to be the first programme that incorporates a continental window and five regional economic economies, covering the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), East African Community (EAC), Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS) and that of West African States (ECOWAS) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).
The €205 million programme, funded by the European Union, is implemented by ITC and the UN Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) together with African partners including the African Union Commission, African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat, regional economic communities (RECs) and regional business councils.
The decision to bring the continental and REC windows together under one umbrella ensures coordinated delivery, and an overall coherent action aligned to the AU Agenda 2063 and its flagship AfCFTA project, and at the same time will capitalize on opportunities arising from the EU Global Gateway and Green Deal initiatives. ITC will lead the coordination of the Continental, EAC and ECCAS, while UNIDO addresses COMESA, ECOWAS and SADC.
Intra-African exports make up 16% of Africa’s total export basket but most of this trade is concentrated within regional economic communities. SADC and ECOWAS exports to Africa are particularly concentrated with intra-REC exports as a share of total exports to Africa at 89% and 66% respectively.
The figures for COMESA, EAC and ECCAS are 50%, 49% and 25%. Intra-African imports are similarly concentrated within regional blocs.
This means that African countries are not taking full advantage of African markets outside of their own regional communities. The African Continental Free Trade Area offers an opportunity to change this.
With both tariff and non-tariff trade cost reductions, it will make more sense for African countries to exploit African markets further afield, source inputs from African suppliers outside of their regional groupings and develop African value chains that span across RECs.
The goal of the ATCMA is to aid this process by harmonizing regulatory frameworks and quality infrastructure, promoting coordinated institutional governance structures, and collaboration and lesson sharing across RECs through moderated platforms. These actions will be complemented by interventions to overcome common market access barriers faced by RECs, promote value addition, and support the design, production, financing, processing, labelling, marketing and distribution of “Made in Africa” products by SMEs.
The ATCMA will target priority regional value chains for each REC, compatible with increased potential for intra-African trade and Africa/EU trade, industrial development, green and sustainable growth and opportunities for women and youth.
The focus on regional value chains is to:
- Boost productivity through an efficient division of labour and capital across countries and sectors.
- Increase intra-African trade which is more diversified than Africa’s trade with the rest of the world.
- Enhance resilience to external shocks and offer a launch pad for “better” integration into global value chains.
However, these competitive regional value chains need to be leveraged by the AfCFTA to feed competitive continental value chains. This is why ATMCA interventions will also target five priority continental value chains with potential to foster trade between RECs, identified together with the African Union, RECs and private sector stakeholders.
To further strengthen the AfCFTA, a continental competitiveness platform is planned to improve regional value chain integration, monitor the region’s competitiveness drivers and outcomes, and link suppliers and buyers across countries and RECs.
For the five promising continental value chains users will be able to explore which African partner offers which input and how much of it, which partner is already competitive in output production, where are the main and growing markets and which conditions of market access hold at every step of the value chain.
The ATCMA will be a transformational game changer for the region. Over the four-year implementation period, we will collaborate closely with UNIDO to strengthen market intelligence and trade regulations for RECs and their member countries. Our partnership will also enhance quality infrastructure systems and promote climate-neutral and sustainable trade practices, enabling the private sector to become more competitive.
What does this mean in numbers?
In the case of the EAC, the ATCMA will assist over 1,000 SMEs to improve their business operations and competitiveness, with direct support to more than 550 enterprises led by women and youth.
It will also support East African business support organizations to improve their performance and service offerings to members, with over 100 organizations and 20 memoranda of understanding (MoU) already signed.
Interventions in other RECs will follow a similar ambitious impact-driven approach and target, creating linkages between SMEs and business support organizations across regional groupings.
The ATCMA will enable ITC to expand its regional footprint on the ground, build new strategic partnerships, and strengthen its technical offering in line with its stakeholders’ most pressing needs.
We have coined and adopted the “triple C” delivery approach for success, guaranteeing coherence, complementarities and consistency in ATCMA interventions across RECs, working hand in hand and “delivering as One UN” with UNIDO.
“The ATCMA is a unique opportunity to combine the strong expertise of ITC on value chain, market and trade intelligence as well as on SME capacity-building and business linkages with UNIDO’s unique expertise in standards, quality infrastructure and conformity assessment services, alongside green enterprise upgrading, cluster development and access to finance,” says Steffen Kaeser, Senior Technical Advisor and ATCMA Coordinator at UNIDO.
Going one step further to translate the macro vision of connecting regions into hands-on support at the national level, the ATCMA will be linked with new ITC pipeline national projects – with Botswana, Uganda, South Sudan and The Gambia serving as pilots.
These changes, along with shifting dynamics and priorities in Africa and globally, are already feeding a new innovative and future-proof ITC Roadmap for Africa to be unveiled in the coming months.
For more information, visit our dedicated project page and reach out to us:
Africa: Continental Component - Africa Trade Competitiveness and Market Access (ATCMA) | ITC