By Dhiladhila Magazine · Issue 06
Namibia holds the tariff access and moves only two products. The new guide bets the missing piece is procedure, not policy.
When the Ministry of International Relations and Trade, the UN Economic Commission for Africa and the Namibia Chamber of Commerce and Industry met in Windhoek in February 2026 to validate a step-by-step guide for trading in goods under the African Continental Free Trade Area, the telling figure was not what Namibia exports but how little of it moves under the new regime. Twenty-four state parties, Namibia among them, have gazetted their tariff schedules, yet only two Namibian products have so far been exported under AfCFTA terms.
That gap between access and use is the problem the guide is built to close. Namibian goods worth N$5.8 billion (about US$320 million) reached African markets by December 2025, against N$5.3 billion in imports, but most of that trade still runs on older arrangements. The ministry’s argument, set out as it developed the guide, is that the binding constraint is no longer the tariff line but the paperwork behind it.
A market opened but barely entered
AfCFTA has been legally live for years, signed in 2018 and ratified by Namibia in 2019, and the preferential access it promises is real on paper. What the two-product tally shows is that legal access and commercial use are different things. A firm can be entitled to a zero tariff and still not ship, because it cannot navigate the steps that turn entitlement into a cleared consignment.
That is why state parties gazetting tariff schedules matters less on its own than it sounds. A schedule sets the price of entry; it does not tell a Windhoek manufacturer which certificate proves origin, which form clears customs, or which classification code a buyer in Accra expects. The guide reads that silence as the real barrier.
A gazetted tariff is permission to trade, not instruction on how to.
Consolidating scattered information
Consultations behind the guide found that traders lacked one consolidated, practical source of trade information. Rules of origin, product classification, customs procedures, certification and border processes each sat in a different document or office, and the cost of assembling them fell on the exporter. For a small firm that cost is often higher than the tariff saving on offer.
The guide answers by pulling those steps into a single sequence and, once verified by national agencies, folding it into the Namibia Trade Information Portal. Zodwa Mabuza of the Economic Commission for Africa framed it as a tool to help businesses navigate trade requirements, access new markets and take part fully in the single market.
The saving AfCFTA offers is real only once the exporter can find the door.
Why information is the cheaper fix
Set against the alternatives, an information guide is a low-cost intervention with a high potential return. Namibia cannot quickly widen its narrow export base or build new factories to fill the continental market, but it can lower the transaction cost of using the access it already holds. That is the wager: procedure is the constraint that policy can move fastest and most cheaply.
The design leans that way. The guide targets micro, small and medium enterprises, and women and youth-led firms, the exporters least able to buy in trade expertise. Reaching remote and rural traders is part of the plan, on the logic that the firms most deterred by paperwork are the ones a guide helps most.
Cutting the cost of using access beats waiting for new capacity to build.
From guide to gazetted trade
The measure of success is blunt: whether the count of products traded under AfCFTA rises from two. Claver Gatete of the Economic Commission for Africa called the guide a milestone in private-sector readiness, but readiness is an input, not a result. The guide moves the number only if firms use it and buyers respond.
There is a caution in the record. Namibia has had continental access for years and used little of it, so a document alone will not shift the trade. What could is the combination the workshop set out: a clear guide, a portal that hosts it, and training that puts it in exporters’ hands.
The honest metric is not readiness but the next product shipped.
For a Namibian manufacturer or trade financier, the February 2026 signal is that the barrier to the continental market is now administrative rather than political, and administrative barriers are the kind a firm can plan around. The decision the guide puts on the table is whether to treat AfCFTA as a live channel worth mastering the procedure for, or keep trading on the older arrangements that ask fewer questions and open fewer markets.
Sources: The Namibian; Namibia fast-tracks AfCFTA implementation (UNECA); AfCFTA Step-by-Step Guide Validated (The Villager)
