Analyzing the African Continental Free Trade Area (the AfCFTA) from an Informality Perspective: A Beautiful House in the Wrong Neighborhood

Abstract

The article critically explores the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) from an informality perspective. The informality perspective sees unofficial rules, norms, practices, processes, actors, and decision-making structures as driving forces of the social world. They are ontologically prior to and building blocks of their formal counterparts. From this viewpoint, the failure to design the AfCFTA from the informal economy baseline makes it an unfit trade agreement for the African continent. Those who drafted the agreement, its supplementary protocols and annexes, and the decision-makers who signed as well as ratified them neglected the informal trading actors and unregistered enterprises in Africa. Rather than building the agreement around unregistered small-to-medium-scale enterprises, operated mostly by women and the youth, the AfCFTA and its legal instruments envisioned a utopian African trade market without them. The drafters and decision-makers of the AfCFTA seem to operate on the basic principle of no formalization and no gain from the free trade agreement. The result is a serious mismatch. The formally oriented AfCFTA is supposed to govern the largely informal African trading ecosystems. The failure to mainstream the informal economy in the AfCFTA makes the African free trade agreement look like, to use a house metaphor, a beautifully constructed house located in the wrong neighborhood. The article substantiates this claim and shows its implications for the Pan-African integration project and the study of international relations.