Centre for Regional Integration Africa
International Development
Media Consultancy
AfCFTA SME Conference
The African Continental Free Trade Area is the world’s largest free trade agreement by the number of participating countries, covering 54 nations and a combined market of over 1.3 billion people. Its full adoption holds transformative potential for African businesses, particularly SMEs, which represent the majority of employment and economic activity on the continent. But the gap between the AfCFTA’s formal existence and the practical awareness of SMEs and businesses who should be engaging with it remains wide.
CRIA’s Regional Training Workshop in Accra was designed to close part of that gap – convening stakeholders at the Movenpick Hotel to deepen understanding of AfCFTA’s mechanisms and build the kind of institutional and business support that the agreement requires to move from ratification into practice.
Getting media coverage for a trade policy workshop is a specific challenge. The subject matter is important but not inherently dramatic, and the intended beneficiaries — SMEs and businesses — are rarely the primary audience for general broadcast news. The publicity strategy needed to place the story on platforms where that audience would encounter it.
What We Did
Mech Consult was engaged to provide broadcast publicity support for the workshop. We worked with the CRIA team to manage media registration and participation and coordinated interviews with key speakers and workshop participants.
Post-workshop, we followed up to secure publication, monitored broadcast coverage across all platforms, clipped and shared stories with the CRIA team, and prepared the publicity report.
The Outcome
We secured publication of the story on prime-time news on radio and TV platforms, whose continental orientation makes it a natural fit for an AfCFTA story targeting pan-African trade awareness.
The publication reached the target audience of SMEs and businesses, contributing to awareness and understanding of the AfCFTA platform and building the stakeholder support the agreement requires for effective adoption.
