Report of the signing ceremony held in Accra on 31 August 2026
Accra, 31 August 2026 — The AfCFTA Secretariat and Quest Ghana Limited signed a joint venture agreement on Monday establishing the AfCFTA Digital Trade Corridor, in a ceremony at the Mövenpick Ambassador Hotel attended by members of the diplomatic community accredited in Ghana, representatives of the private sector and accredited media. The Republic of Seychelles will provide sovereign support for the venture and will host its headquarters.
The agreement was signed by H.E. Wamkele Mene, Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat, and Mr Philip Gamey, Executive Chairman of Quest Ghana Limited, and witnessed by Hon. Pierre Laporte, Minister for Finance, Economic Planning, Trade and Investment of the Republic of Seychelles. It follows a Memorandum of Understanding concluded in March 2026 and Cabinet approval by the Government of Seychelles in July.
Opening the ceremony, the Secretary-General set the agreement against the trade figures of the past year. Africa traded over 220 billion United States dollars in goods and services in 2024, he said, with a significant share in manufactured and value-added production — a shift he described as reducing the continent’s reliance on the export of unprocessed commodities.
He presented the Corridor as the point at which an adopted instrument becomes an operating one. “We are moving from policy, from talk, to action,” he said, describing the venture as the first integrated approach to digital trade taken at continental rather than national level. “Trade is the engine of Africa’s prosperity, and digital infrastructure is the track on which that engine must run.”
Addressing the choice of Seychelles as host of the joint venture’s headquarters, the Secretary-General said that geographical location does not determine the scale of a country’s participation in the digital economy, and that hosting the headquarters reflected a shared confidence in Seychelles as a partner in building continental institutional architecture.
The Executive Chairman of Quest Ghana Limited described the Corridor as a digital rail on which the next generation of African commerce will run, and set out a programme of work covering a continental marketplace, cross-border payments and a minerals and commodities exchange.
For the Republic of Seychelles, the Minister for Finance, Economic Planning, Trade and Investment, Hon. Pierre Laporte, confirmed his Government’s commitment to the initiative and to hosting its headquarters. “Seychelles has long served as a bridge between markets,” he said, describing the venture as an investment in Africa’s shared prosperity and in the promise of an integrated continental market.
In the question-and-answer session that followed, the Secretary-General was asked about dispute resolution, about awareness among businesses, and about how payments and exchange rates would work across the continent.
On disputes, he pointed to the provisions of the Agreement itself, which apply to all activity carried out under it, and to the practical work that precedes them. Where a customs authority at a border does not apply AfCFTA rules, he said, the Secretariat takes the matter up with the authorities concerned. “Where you have this challenge as a private sector, we intervene on your behalf.” He described a team that engages the private sector and governments daily, and region-specific sessions that explain to businesses the rights the Agreement gives them — the most recent held in Botswana for the Southern Africa region — and invited operators facing a specific difficulty to contact the Secretariat directly.
On payments, he described continental payment infrastructure as a highway onto which banks and other providers connect, and said the Secretariat supports a multiplicity of solutions rather than a single one. Asked how exchange rates would be determined, he was explicit that this remains the mandate of national central banks: “We have not taken away the authority of the central banks to undertake that very important task.”
The ceremony closed with a group photograph with the ministerial witness, the Heads of Mission and the diplomatic community.
