Businesses seeking to benefit from preferential treatment under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) must ensure their products meet the agreement’s Rules of Origin, the Ghana Revenue Authority (GRA) has cautioned.
Joycelyn Ntiako, a Revenue Officer with the Customs Division of the GRA, explained that the rules determine the economic nationality of a product and establish whether it qualifies for preferential treatment under AfCFTA.
Speaking on the Citi Breakfast Show on Wednesday, October 7, 2026, during a discussion focused on helping businesses understand what AfCFTA means for them, Ms Ntiako said businesses must pay attention to where their products originate and how they are processed.
“When we talk about origin, origin simply means the economic nationality of a product. The product was born somewhere. So when we talk about Rules of Origin, it is a legal criterion that is used to determine the economic nationality of a product in international trade,” she explained.
According to her, products must satisfy specific criteria under the AfCFTA agreement before they can enjoy preferential treatment.
“Before a product can enjoy preferential treatment, it needs to meet one of these criteria, which is known as Rules of Origin,” she said.
Ms Ntiako said the rules broadly distinguish between products that are wholly obtained in a country and those that have been substantially transformed through processing involving inputs from different countries.
She illustrated the distinction using cocoa and chocolate production.
“If I send a cocoa bean into another country, which I grew in Ghana, it was wholly from Ghana. It didn’t go through any change. But if I added milk, sugar and other things to it, but the milk I got from France, I got the sugar from Togo, and I mixed it into a chocolate bar, even though the cocoa bean is from Ghana, it was transformed,” she explained.
Ms Ntiako said such processing could require the application of specific rules to determine whether the finished product can still be regarded as a Ghanaian-origin product for purposes of AfCFTA.
Her explanation forms part of efforts to help businesses understand the requirements they must meet to take advantage of the continental trade agreement and access preferential treatment for qualifying goods.
The discussion focused on the practical implications of AfCFTA for businesses, including how manufacturers can determine whether their products qualify under the agreement’s origin requirements.
SOURCE: CITINEWSROOM
