Aiming at creating a single continental market for goods and services, free movement of business persons and investments and expand intra-African trade among other things, the first ever Africa Trade Week 2016 was held in Addis Ababa on Monday.

The Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) is also expected to enhance competitiveness at the industry and enterprise levels on the continent.

Organised by the Economic Commission for Africa’s (ECA) Regional Integration and Trade Division and African Union’s (AU) Trade and Industry department is expected to discuss unanswered question and come up with solutions of the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) as it puts special emphasis on trade facilitation, implementation as well as building productive capacities for industrialisation on the continent.

Speaking on behalf of Abdalla Hamdok, ECA Acting Executive Secretary David Luke said the CFTA is a bold initiative aiming to bring together 54 African countries with a combined population of more than one billion people and a combined gross domestic product of more than $3.4-trillion.

He urged participants to discuss how Africa can ensure the CFTA gets effectively implemented along with the full range of key African trade policy issues.

“These include Africa’s relations with Asia, Europe, US and emerging markets; how trade can support gender equality and empowerment; perspectives from the regional economic communities and the CFTA negotiations and related flanking measures,” he said during the opening of the summit.

He stressed that the CFTA presents Africa with a critical opportunity for development, as research by the ECA has shown that the CFTA could add up to 2.5pc to Africa’s annual economic output which is around $65-billion based on data for 2014.

“Unlike so much of the commodity-driven growth that we have recently experiences, the CFTA is likely to make growth in the African economy more sustainable and inclusive,” he said.

“As such, the CFTA presents us with an opportunity that we simply have to seize but how do we do so? There are many questions that remain to be answered on how exactly to pursue this initiative.”

He further stated that the discussion allow actors “to examine our trading relationships with partners and how to re-calibrate them to ensure coherence with the CFTA initiative and its objectives as well as gender issues and the importance of trade police being gender sensitive”.

One of the most anticipated issue that participants will discuss in the relationship between Africa and the US following the recent election of business magnet Donald Trump as President-elect , the changing architecture of global trade, African Growth and Opportunity Act (Agoa) implementation, trade partnerships, the CFTA, trade facilitation and related issues.

The ATW, which is organised under the theme of “Advancing Social Economic Structural Transformation through Intra-Africa Trade”, is bringing together a broad range of participants, including senior governmental officials, representatives from RECs, civil society, CEOs ad executives from the private sector, development banks, academia, and international development agencies, among others.

Also speaking during the opening ceremony, Fatima Haram Acyl, AUC of Trade and Industry Commissioner said Africa needs to bring the cost of doing business down, adding this would signify boost trade performance with trade facilitation, which looks at procedures and controls governing the movement of goods across borders enabling Africa to do that.

The Commissioner said that the Africa Trade Facilitation Forum which is the sideline main event of ATW 2016 is also one that is expected to explore ways to overcome the obstacles to trade and imports across Africa such as non-tariff barriers including quotas, embargoes, sanctions and levies.

“The CFTA will help address many of Africa’s biggest challenges such as youth unemployment, skills development, women’s empowerment, industrialisation, infrastructure development and eventually, Africa’s transformation,” she said.

The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development’s (Unctad) secretary-general Mukhisa Kituyi, on his part noted that the reasons for creating a Pan-African free trade area are important even from today’s challenges so it can have enough reasons.

“These include Africa’s ability to expand trade, inclusive trade has the best possibilities, the most flexible opportunities are within Africa itself,” he said.

“Second, as the world goes towards much more refined global value chains our ability to create regional value chains, trade linkages is the first building block towards being competent in order to find a scaled-up possibility on the global value chains and third, Africa’s unemployed youth needs trade related opportunities and these opportunities have to be dealt with through best practices in Africa and cross boarder engagements – infrastructure that goes beyond countries, possibilities of e-trade for example that go beyond country boundaries and this is the ecosystem that can only be created under a Pan-African free trade area.”

The Africa Trade Forum is part of the Architecture for the Continental Free Trade Area adopted by the 18th Ordinary Session of the Assembly of Heads of State and Government of the African Union (AU) that was held in January 2012.