Kenya for West African Tech Companies: Trade in Services Under AfCFTA

A Nigerian, Ghanaian, or other West African tech company weighing Kenya as a regional base often assumes the African Continental Free Trade Area gives it a clean, symmetrical right to operate. The reality is more asymmetric and more useful once you understand it correctly: Kenya’s side of the AfCFTA services framework is live and operative; the equivalent framework on the Nigerian side is still being finalised. That gap matters for how a West African company should actually plan its Kenyan entry.

Two Different Starting Points

Kenya signed the AfCFTA Agreement on 21 March 2018, ratified it on 6 May 2018, and deposited its instrument of ratification on 10 May 2018, among the earliest African Union member states to do so. Nigeria ratified separately in December 2020, after an initial period of hesitation over the Agreement’s implications for Nigerian industry. Both are State Parties to the Agreement itself, but ratifying the Agreement is only the first of several steps that have to happen before a company can actually rely on AfCFTA for services market access, and Kenya and Nigeria are not at the same point in that sequence.

What AfCFTA Actually Does for Services

The AfCFTA Protocol on Trade in Services, in force since 30 May 2019, covers four modes of supply: cross-border supply, consumption abroad, commercial presence, and the temporary movement of natural persons. Setting up a Kenyan subsidiary or branch to deliver software or IT services falls under commercial presence, the third mode. Critically, the Protocol itself does not create market access rights directly; it creates a framework under which each State Party negotiates and adopts its own Schedule of Specific Commitments, sector by sector, setting out what market access and national treatment it is actually offering to service suppliers from other State Parties. Until a country’s schedule is adopted and gazetted, the Protocol’s general principles exist, but the specific, enforceable commitments a company can point to do not.

Kenya’s Schedule Is Live; Nigeria’s Is Still Catching Up

Kenya is one of five East African Community states, alongside Rwanda, Tanzania, Burundi and Uganda, that have gazetted their adopted Schedules of Specific Commitments across the five AfCFTA priority services sectors: business services, communication services, financial services, tourism, and transport. Kenya’s schedule covers a majority of the available sub-sectors, including Communication Services, the category most directly relevant to a technology company’s commercial presence.

Nigeria’s position is markedly earlier in the process. Nigeria’s Schedule of Specific Commitments for Trade in Services was only submitted to the ECOWAS Commission for regional harmonisation in October 2025, alongside a national mapping exercise the Ministry conducted the same year identifying Nigerian digital service firms interested in the African market. That schedule still needs to be harmonised with other ECOWAS members’ offers, forwarded to the AfCFTA Secretariat, and gazetted domestically before it carries the same operative weight Kenya’s schedule already has. In practical terms, a Kenyan company looking to rely on AfCFTA to access the Nigerian services market today is relying on a framework that is not yet fully in place; a Nigerian company looking to rely on AfCFTA to access the Kenyan services market is relying on one that already is.

What This Means in Practice

For a West African tech company, this asymmetry is a genuine, if temporary, advantage. Because market access commitments under the Protocol run on the host state’s own schedule, what actually governs a Nigerian company’s commercial presence in Kenya is Kenya’s commitment, already adopted and gazetted, not the state of Nigeria’s reciprocal offer. AfCFTA does not, however, substitute for Kenyan company law or sector licensing. It protects against discriminatory treatment relative to Kenyan or third-country operators in the sectors and modes Kenya has actually committed to; it does not exempt a foreign company from incorporating under the Companies Act, from the sector-specific licensing we cover in our guides to phasing regulated activities into a Kenyan company and to EPRA and digital credit licensing, or from ordinary Kenyan tax and immigration rules. The specific limitations Kenya has attached to its Communication Services commitment, if any, sit inside the schedule itself and are worth checking before assuming an unqualified right of entry.

Practical Takeaway

A West African tech company entering Kenya today should treat AfCFTA as a genuine, currently operative protection against being treated worse than a Kenyan or third-country competitor in the sectors Kenya has scheduled, layered on top of, not instead of, the ordinary Kenyan incorporation and licensing process. The same company should not assume the reverse route, using a Kenyan base to access its own home market on AfCFTA terms, carries the same weight yet, since that depends on its home country’s own schedule reaching the same stage Kenya’s has already reached.