Secretary-General of African Young Entrepreneurs Federation (AfEF), Sheriff Ghali, has expressed the Federations’ resolve to ensure SMEs benefit from the AfCFTA.

According to him, entrepreneurs have shown interest in the free trade area. However, not much avenues are in place to encourage dialogue on the benefits of AfCFTA.

“These are some of the things that propel us to form AfEF. We’ve realized that various African countries are in… to implement their own AfCFTA within their countries. But we have situations where in our country a lot of the young people are excluded when it comes to the dialogue and when it comes to the table of discussion with respect to AfCFTA.

“Here within Ghana, you’d realize that, at least a lot of the young entrepreneurs are ready and willing to be able to train. Every day I get young people trooping into my office asking, how am I going to get the certificate of origin? What am I suppose to do to be able to get my products ready to trade?”.

Solving challenges of SMEs to benefit from AfCFTA

Additionally, Mr. Ghali explained that, young entrepreneurs need to be enlightened on the protocols of AfCFTA to benefit from it.

He further averred that, government and other stakeholders must pitch in to help entrepreneurs build capacity

“However, we will need to train the young people further on AfCFTA. Because what we’ve realized is that, though the young people are ready to trade on AfCFTA, to leverage the market, there’s still lack of information about the whole protocols of AfCFTA.

“So, yes, generally, young entrepreneurs in Ghana, we are empowering them in our own small way. To prepare, add value to their product and get ready to export into the continent. But then, they still need a lot of capacity building and we use this to call on the state development partners to support so that young people can be empowered in our country to start leveraging AfCFTA”.

Touching on how the Federation will assist in solving the challenges of SME growth, he indicated that, they must be “unified” to achieve that.

“…we must be a unified front that will champion the voice of SMEs. Yes, we have 70% of the African business population being SMEs and these people… have issues they face.

“AfCFTA is not only for African countries but the whole of the continent. What an SME in Ghana might be facing cannot be similar to what an SME in Nigeria might be facing. So, the Federation is going to make sure that the voices of these SMEs are heard. When we dialogue with them, we get them and get their issues and make sure it gets to the Secretariat”.

Harnessing potential of SMEs

On his part, President of AfEF, Siita Sofo Hissan, intimated that although there’s much optimism around the free trade, how the average business benefit from it matters. He further called on stakeholders to support the federation in realizing the objective of AfCFTA

“Now as young entrepreneurs, I can say that we are always the underdogs… because we don’t have the needed capital and the needed resources. We don’t have the money, the know-how [and] the capabilities to push and to succeed. So, that’s why we are saying that, why don’t we come together, organize the youth of Africa to come together under our network, so that we can galvanize the youth and give them the needed information”.

Mr. Hissan further urged participants to actively support businesses to leverage the benefits of the free trade.

“We can all admit that we are in Africa, we have all the needed natural resources… but are we Africans benefiting from it?

“So, we are saying that let’s advocate, lets make a stronger voice for AfCFTA to inculcate youth leaders… because AfCFTA is talking about 2063. We are talking about giving a lot of milestones that will benefit the Africa Union and AfCFTA is the gamechanger that’s going to capitalize the achievements of the AU 2063 goals”.