This month the African Continental Free Trade Agreement began operation (https://mg.co.za/business/2021-01-10-africa-trade-bloc-bets-on-business-without-borders/) The Text is available here: https://au.int/en/treaties/agreement-establishing-african-continental-free-trade-area.
It is ambitious in Geographic scope and a welcome step in African integration and warms the cockles of a pan-Africanist like myself. However, its also important to note its limitations on key issues like intellectual property/access to technology and on investment rules. For one thing: IP is left to be negotiated in Phase II (Art. 7). Between @OAPI_TWIT (Francophone) and @_ARIPO (Anglophone) there is a gnarly problem of merging the interests of the national IP offices with the policies of the trade ministries, health and culture ministries). Investment is usually simpler but because so many countries have signed a multiplicity of Investment Agreement with Investor State Dispute Settlement, the coordination problem is also orders of magnitude beyond coordinating on tariffs.
TRALAC @TradeLawCentre has a great resource on the agreement: https://tralac.org/resources/by-region/cfta.html. Gerhard Erasmus has a nice comment on the next steps in Phase II negotiations: https://tralac.org/blog/article/1. I predict that the Phase II negotiations are more likely to succeed on Competition , possibly get close on Investment and likely fail on intellectual property due to specific national interest groups that have already doomed OAPI/ARIPO merger proposals.
Technology, Sustainability & Human Rights 