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Policy Paper
The African Union Summit of February 2026 instructed the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Council of Ministers to negotiate a Protocol on Industrial Policy and Development. This work, handled without adequate preparation, is likely to reproduce the weaknesses it is meant to remedy. This paper is a conceptual mapping exercise, written to raise the preparatory questions before drafting begins, rather than to prescribe outcomes.
It proceeds in five sections:
1. It works towards a definition of industrial policy narrow enough to be drafted into treaty language and broad enough to capture the instruments that actually drive industrialization, anchoring that boundary work in the AfCFTA’s own objectives.
2. It maps the landscape the Protocol will enter: the AU’s continental instruments, the Regional Economic Community industrial policy frameworks that predate AfCFTA, and the provisions already inside AfCFTA that operate as industrial policy, whether or not they are labelled as such, from tariff schedules and exclusion lists, to product-specific rules of origin, infant-industry and general exceptions, special economic zones, services commitments in industrial-enabling sectors, and the unratified Phase II disciplines.
3. It sets out what is realistically negotiable: shared principles, a safe-harbor catalogue of permitted instruments, positive harmonization in targeted areas, and governance and coordination mechanisms, together with the negotiating dynamics that will determine which of these receives binding treatment.
