Question to the Department for International Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for International Trade, what recent steps she has taken to improve trade with African countries.

On 1 January 2021 the United Kingdom introduced its own Generalised Scheme of Preferences that provides duty-free, quota-free access to the United Kingdom’s market for more than thirty African countries and tariff reductions for other eligible African countries. This year we will launch improvements to the scheme, which will offer the lowest income countries improved terms when trading with the United Kingdom.

The United Kingdom has also secured eight Free Trade Agreements with African regions and countries including the Southern African Customs Union and Mozambique; Eastern and other Southern African states; Cote d’Ivoire; Cameroon, Egypt, Kenya, Morocco and Tunisia.

The Department has launched an online investment platform for African projects and the Africa Investment Group, which brings together investors and representatives of the United Kingdom’s Government, to drive collectively more investment flows into Africa.