Although the idea that Africa’s next stage in development requires industrialization is decades old, the current process of linking industrialization to the continent’s trade reform agenda – is most appropriately viewed as starting with the January 2008 adoption of the programme for the Accelerated Industrial Development of Africa (AIDA). The process has seen repeated commitments though other programmes and documents, culminating in its most clear expression and summed in the title of the 2015 United National Economic Commission on Africa ‘Industrialising through Trade’.

A summary review of the commitments made in the landmark programmes/publications for the period 2008-2015, is presented in this Trade Brief. The programme/documents summarised are: the Strategy for the Accelerated Industrial Development of Africa (AIDA); Action Plan for AIDA; Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa (PIDA); Financing PIDA; Issues Paper for Boosting Intra-African Trade (BIAT); BIAT Action Plan; Assessing Regional Integration in Africa (ARIA VI); Framework for a Renewed UN/AU Partnership on Africa’s Integration and Development Agenda (PAIDA); and Economic Report on Africa: Industrializing through Trade.

For the sake of brevity, certain basic points, in some cases spelled out at some length in some of the documentation, will be summarised. While this does some violence to the nuance of the documents (for example, the Continental Free trade Area receives more emphasis in later documents), the following points are explicit (or in a few cases, strongly implicit) across all the literature:

• Africa has generally enjoyed high levels of growth since the early years of the 21st Century. The issue is now how to achieve the structural transformation needed to take this beyond resources extraction.

• Across the continent there has been improved governance including economic governance, a commitment to building enabling environments and regulatory reform.

• The appropriate overall continental strategy is to enter Global Value Chains as manufacturers of intermediate goods.

• Reducing trade barriers between countries will facilitate this by integrating to expand factor and sales markets. Africa trades too little with itself and the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) is a priority.

• (The eight acknowledged) Regional Economic Communities (RECs) are the building blocks of this process.

• The main hurdle is not policy/strategy as reflected in this documentation but implementation, especially at the level of national governments.

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