Tariff Liberalisation Does Not Automatically Create Usable Market Access

Tariff liberalisation is one of the most visible instruments of trade integration. But a zero tariff does not necessarily create usable market access. This distinction matters for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). The reduction and elimination of tariffs is intended to stimulate intra-African trade, support regional value chains and turn the opening of markets into commercial opportunities for African firms. Yet a product can qualify for preferential treatment and still encounter significant barriers before it reaches a customer in another African country. Among the least visible of these are conformity assessment requirements, and, in particular, the failure to recognise conformity assessments already carried out elsewhere in Africa. The reason is simple: market access does not depend on satisfying a single legal or regulatory requirement. A product may pass through a chain of regulatory gates, and clearing one does not guarantee passage through the next.

Consider an African manufacturer exporting an electrical product to another African market. If the product satisfies the AfCFTA Rules of Origin, it may qualify for a reduced or zero tariff. But Rules of Origin establish only its entitlement to preferential customs treatment. They do not establish that the product complies with the technical regulations of the importing country. The exporter may still have to demonstrate conformity through testing, inspection or certification, and may have to obtain a national conformity mark. If the importing country does not recognise an assessment already carried out in the exporting country, the same product may have to be tested or certified again. The tariff may be zero. The regulatory cost of crossing the border is not.

Governments have legitimate reasons to impose technical requirements relating to health, safety, environmental protection, consumer protection and product quality. The problem arises when compliance must be demonstrated repeatedly, particularly where the technical requirements are identical or substantially equivalent and the original assessment was conducted by a competent body.

The distinction between technical requirements and conformity assessment is therefore fundamental. Technical regulations and standards establish what a product must satisfy. Conformity assessment provides evidence that it satisfies those requirements. Mutual recognition addresses a third question: whether that evidence can travel across jurisdictions.

In sum, these are three different stages of market access. Rules of Origin determine whether a product qualifies for the preference. Conformity assessment establishes evidence of technical compliance. Mutual recognition determines whether that evidence will be accepted elsewhere. A product can therefore pass one gate and still be stopped at the next.

It is precisely this gap between compliance and recognition that the recently adopted AfCFTA Mutual Recognition Agreement on Conformity Assessment seeks to address. Its significance goes beyond cooperation between standards authorities. It seeks to make the evidence of compliance itself more portable across African markets.

The Agreement does not mean that every certificate issued in one African country must automatically be accepted in every other. Rather, it establishes a system under which State Parties accept conformity-assessment results issued by designated conformity-assessment bodies of other State Parties. Those bodies must meet the designation requirements established under the Agreement, including requirements concerning competence, accreditation or equivalent means of demonstrating competence, and the scope of the conformity-assessment activities they are authorised to perform. The relevant products or services, technical requirements, standards and conformity-assessment procedures must also be specified. Where these requirements are satisfied, the importing State Party must accept the conformity-assessment result for the purpose of demonstrating compliance, rather than requiring the same assessment again.

This is mutual recognition, not harmonisation. Harmonisation seeks to align technical requirements. Mutual recognition addresses a different problem: whether evidence generated within one regulatory system can be trusted and used within another. The two approaches can reinforce one another, but complete harmonisation is not always necessary for trade to function effectively.

Mutual recognition is therefore, at its core, an architecture of regulatory trust. An importing country does not accept a certificate merely because it was issued elsewhere. It accepts it because the system provides confidence in the competence of the body that produced it, the assessment performed and the requirements against which conformity was established.

The economic implications become particularly important for regional value chains. A manufacturer supplying several African markets can face a cumulative compliance burden even when tariffs have disappeared. Testing, inspection or certification may be repeated at successive destinations, generating laboratory fees, administrative costs, sample transportation, delays and uncertainty.

The problem is not simply that compliance costs money. It is that the same compliance may have to be purchased more than once. For large enterprises, that cost may be manageable. For smaller manufacturers, it can determine whether exporting to another African market is commercially viable at all. Regional integration depends not only on making markets legally accessible, but on reducing the fixed costs of entering them.

This is where mutual recognition connects trade facilitation with industrial development. If a manufacturer can demonstrate compliance once and have that evidence recognised across several markets, the regulatory cost of regional expansion falls. A larger market becomes economically usable without requiring the firm to recreate its compliance infrastructure at every border.

But mutual recognition cannot operate on trust alone. Accreditation, competent testing and certification bodies, clearly defined technical requirements and conformity-assessment procedures, and mechanisms for addressing concerns about designated bodies are the infrastructure of regulatory trust. Without them, mutual recognition risks becoming a formal commitment without a corresponding reduction in trade costs. This points to a broader distinction between formal market access and usable market access.

Formal market access exists when the legal framework allows a product to enter a market (for example, through tariff preferences). Usable market access exists when a firm can actually exploit that entitlement at a commercially reasonable cost and with sufficient regulatory predictability.

The difference is crucial. A tariff preference cannot, by itself, ensure that the product satisfies the destination market's technical requirements. The AfCFTA implementation therefore involves more than lowering tariffs. It involves reducing the distance between legal market opening and the practical ability of firms to use that opening.

This is particularly important in Africa, where national and regional standards, accreditation and conformity-assessment systems have developed through different institutional pathways. Continental integration does not necessarily require replacing those systems with a single African system. It requires making them sufficiently interoperable for the results produced in one system to be usable in another.

The Mutual Recognition Agreement addresses precisely this problem. It does not eliminate national technical regulation or weaken legitimate requirements for health, safety, environmental or consumer protection. Its objective is narrower and more practical: to reduce unnecessary duplication in demonstrating compliance.

For smaller firms, that distinction can be decisive. If the cost of demonstrating compliance rises every time a product enters another market, the effective size of the regional market available to the firm shrinks. If compliance evidence can travel with the product, the opposite happens: the regulatory cost of expansion falls as the number of accessible markets grows.

This suggests a different way of thinking about African trade integration. Market access is not a switch. It is a chain. A product must qualify for the preference, satisfy the technical requirements and be able to demonstrate that compliance in a form the destination market will accept. Friction at any one stage can diminish the commercial value created by the others.

The logic can be reduced to three questions:

1. Does the product qualify? - Rules of Origin.
2. Does it comply? - Conformity assessment.
3. Is that evidence portable to other jurisdictions? - Mutual recognition.

The AfCFTA Mutual Recognition Agreement connects the second and third questions. Its deeper significance is therefore not simply that it can reduce paperwork or avoid duplicate testing. It is that it can make compliance itself portable. Tariff liberalisation removes a price barrier. Rules of Origin establish entitlement to the preference. Conformity assessment produces the evidence of compliance. Mutual recognition can allow that evidence to travel with the product instead of being recreated at every destination.

That is the difference between opening a market and making it usable: open markets are a legal achievement; usable markets are a commercial one. The next stage of African trade integration lies in closing the distance between the two.