AfCFTA was not built on a blank slate. Africa already had a dense web of regional trade blocs — the Regional Economic Communities — with decades of integration experience, varying success, and a serious problem of overlap. This module covers those building blocks, the spaghetti-bowl problem they create, and the challenge of assembling them into a single continental market.
The Regional Economic Communities
The African Union recognises eight Regional Economic Communities (RECs) as the building blocks of continental integration. The most significant: the East African Community (EAC — Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, South Sudan, DRC — among the most advanced, a customs union and common market with monetary-union ambitions); the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS — 15 West African countries, a customs union with free movement and a long-planned single currency, the eco); the Southern African Development Community (SADC) and the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA — large, overlapping memberships); plus ECCAS (Central Africa), IGAD (Horn of Africa), the AMU (Maghreb, largely dormant), and CEN-SAD. They vary enormously in depth and effectiveness — some are functioning customs unions, others mostly paper — but together they represent the existing infrastructure of African integration on which AfCFTA builds.
The overlapping-membership problem
The African spaghetti bowl
The central problem with the RECs is overlapping membership: many African countries belong to MULTIPLE RECs simultaneously, with different and sometimes conflicting rules, tariff schedules, rules of origin, and external tariffs. A country can be in both COMESA and SADC and the EAC, each with its own trade regime — which is logically incoherent for a customs union (you cannot have two different common external tariffs at once). This is the spaghetti bowl (Bhagwati, the preferential-trade module) applied to Africa: a tangle of overlapping agreements that creates complexity, raises trade costs, confuses firms, and makes deeper integration (like customs unions) impossible where memberships conflict. The overlapping memberships arose from a mix of politics, hedging, and the multiplication of integration initiatives, and rationalising them is one of the hardest tasks of continental integration. AfCFTA must somehow harmonise a continent whose existing blocs overlap and conflict — a major reason its negotiation and implementation are so complex.
The Tripartite FTA
A key stepping stone toward continental integration was the Tripartite Free Trade Area (TFTA) — an effort to merge three of the largest RECs (the EAC, COMESA, and SADC) into a single free-trade area spanning much of eastern and southern Africa. The TFTA was conceived partly to address the overlapping-membership problem by harmonising across these three blocs, and it served as a learning experience and a building block for AfCFTA (many of the same negotiation issues — rules of origin, tariff schedules — were rehearsed there). Its slow progress also previewed the difficulties AfCFTA would face. The TFTA illustrates the 'building-block' approach to continental integration: rather than ignore the RECs, integration proceeds by progressively merging and harmonising them upward toward the continental level.
Building AfCFTA on the RECs
AfCFTA's relationship to the RECs is both its foundation and its central tension. The official design treats the RECs as the 'building blocks' of AfCFTA — countries are expected to liberalise within their RECs and then the RECs integrate upward into the continental market, with the RECs continuing to operate (a country can have deeper integration within its REC and the AfCFTA framework continentally). The advantage: AfCFTA builds on existing institutions, relationships, and progress rather than starting from scratch. The challenge: the RECs overlap and conflict (the spaghetti bowl), they vary enormously in depth (some are real customs unions, others barely function), and harmonising them into a coherent continental framework — reconciling different tariff schedules, rules of origin, and external tariffs — is enormously difficult. The 'variable geometry' approach (allowing countries to integrate at different speeds) is a pragmatic response, but it also perpetuates fragmentation. How AfCFTA navigates the inherited REC architecture — building on it without being trapped by its incoherence — is one of the defining challenges of the whole project, and a recurring theme in assessing whether it will work (the final module).
Exercise
A country belongs to three different Regional Economic Communities with conflicting tariff schedules and rules of origin, and is now also part of AfCFTA. (1) Explain why belonging to multiple RECs is logically problematic, especially for customs unions. (2) Explain the spaghetti-bowl costs this creates for the country's firms. (3) Explain the building-block approach AfCFTA takes to the RECs and its advantages and tensions. (4) Recommend how the country and AfCFTA should handle the overlapping-membership problem.