As trading under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) accelerates, effective national coordination is critical to ensuring local economies and businesses capitalise on continental market access. This background note examines pragmatic institutional models for establishing Mozambique’s AfCFTA National Implementation Committee (NIC) to lead, monitor and coordinate trade reform.

Drawing on multi-stakeholder consultations, private sector surveys and experiences from other AfCFTA member states, the authors conclude that creating a standalone institution would be unnecessarily costly and redundant given current fiscal and technical constraints. Instead, Mozambique’s most effective approach is to leverage and expand the mandate of its existing National Trade Facilitation Committee (NTFC).

The report details two primary governance pathways under this model:

Option 1: Corridor-aligned domestic expansion – Expands the NTFC to integrate Regional Development Agencies (such as the Zambeze Valley Development Agency) and key transport corridors (Maputo, Beira and Nacala). It decentralises coordination into regional committees (South, Centre and North), co-chaired by corridor management entities to keep trade reforms grounded in local commercial realities.

Option 2: Cross-border corridor coordination – Builds on Option 1 by establishing an ad hoc mechanism to include public- and private-sector representatives from neighbouring transit economies along shared corridors, resolving regional border and transit bottlenecks collaboratively.

The authors emphasise that establishing the committee is a necessary but insufficient step. Successful implementation will require addressing three critical enablers: strengthening the technical expertise of the secretariat, securing sustainable and predictable domestic funding (such as through existing PPP arrangements like Mcnet and Kudumba) and establishing high-level political leadership anchored by the Prime Minister.

Report by the Overseas Development Institute