With gender and trade now linked on the international agenda, gender approaches in regional trade agreements (RTAs) could have significant implications for women entrepreneurs and traders around the world. Building on the foundation of African Regional Economic Communities (RECs), the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) includes gender as an express priority alongside sustainable and inclusive socio-economic development. Yet this is only a starting point. A gender-focused AfCFTA protocol is under negotiation, representing a significant opportunity to reassess RTA provisions on gender and consider more tailored, contextual approaches that could benefit women on the African continent and around the world. This chapter will present a comparative assessment of approaches for evaluating and categorizing gender and trade approaches in RTAs. These include a focus on gender responsiveness and incorporation of international and domestic legal design options for ‘inclusive law and regulation’ in order to use RTAs to address more holistically the concrete challenges facing women. The chapter also includes a contextual analysis of how trade rules could more actively support women’s work, reduce procedural hurdles in the market, enhance access to finance and digital inclusion, and promote food security under the AfCFTA and future RTAs.

This chapter explores sustainability reporting regimes in six African countries representing sub-regions of the continent – Egypt, Equatorial Guinea, Kenya, Nigeria, Botswana and South Africa. It reveals that Africa is catching up on sustainability reporting as each jurisdiction is found to have a sustainability reporting regime with an identified regulatory model(s). However, the conflicting nature of sustainability reporting standards calls for a broader reform strategy or policy harmonisation. It thus argues that the African Peer Review Mechanism, Regional Economic Communities, and new African Continental Free Trade Area present opportunities for sustainability reporting policy harmonisation in Africa. It is further argued that African regimes should jettison self-regulatory sustainability reporting models and opt for sanctions-based models or hybrid models combining mandatory and voluntary approaches. It observes, however, that the future of sustainability reporting in Africa lies in integrated reporting with its impact not just on corporate performance but also on strong sustainability.