Written By | Staff Writer
Washington has pushed the African Growth and Opportunity Act out to 2028.
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Economic & Social Transformation
For most of the past fourteen months, African manufacturers selling to the United States have been planning around a cliff. The African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), the 26-year-old programme that gives eligible sub-Saharan African countries duty-free access to the US market for thousands of products, expired on 30 September 2025. Congress revived it retroactively in February 2026, but only until 31 December 2026, which left exporters looking at a second expiry less than two months from today.
That cliff has now been moved. On 2 September 2026, President Donald Trump signed H.R. 6500, the Continuing Appropriations and Extensions Act, 2027, a stop-gap federal funding law that also extends AGOA to 31 December 2028. The House had passed the package 370 to 48 a day earlier, after the Senate approved an amended version in early August. Governments from Nairobi to Pretoria welcomed the news.
The relief is real, but it is narrower than the headlines suggest. The extension changes one date and nothing else, and it lands in a US trade regime where AGOA now removes only one layer from a growing stack of duties. Africa’s trade ministries and exporters can treat the next 26 months in one of two ways: as a reprieve to wait out, or as a deadline to diversify against. That choice is the subject of this article.
What the September Law Actually Did
Under the new law, AGOA and the Haiti economic programme that rode alongside it are extended for two years. Trade analysts and South Africa’s American Chamber of Commerce stress that the only change to AGOA is its end date. The beneficiary countries keep their status, and the third-country fabric provision survives. That provision lets the poorer beneficiaries assemble garments from imported Asian yarn and cloth and still ship them duty-free. For the apparel industries of Kenya, Madagascar and Lesotho, most of the programme’s commercial value sits in that one clause.
Several things did not change. The law does not lengthen the horizon to anything an investor would recognise. Senators Chris Coons and James Risch had proposed a 16-year renewal, to 2041, in 2024. Investors in textiles, assembly and agro-processing typically plan on five- to ten-year horizons, as Ecofin Agency noted when the vote passed. The law also does not reopen the refund window from the 2025–26 lapse. Importers who paid full duties between 1 October 2025 and 3 February 2026 had to claim refunds by 2 August 2026, and that money is now gone for anyone who missed the deadline. Finally, the law does not settle which countries are eligible. The US President still decides eligibility each calendar year, and the US Trade Representative opened its review for 2027 on 30 June 2026.
The Numbers: A Programme Already Shrinking
Even before the latest extension, AGOA was carrying less trade. According to the Congressional Research Service’s August 2026 report, US imports that claimed AGOA duty-free treatment totalled $5.04 billion in 2025. That is down almost 36 percent from $7.9 billion in 2024, and down from $9.3 billion in 2023. Thirty-three countries were eligible for 2026.
The mix of goods matters as much as the total. In 2025 the largest AGOA import category was refined copper, up roughly 400 percent on 2024 and driven largely by the Democratic Republic of Congo. Apparel fell 39 percent, passenger vehicles collapsed by 75 percent, and crude oil also declined. By value, the top five beneficiaries were South Africa ($1.6 billion), the DRC ($1.4 billion), Nigeria ($409.9 million), Kenya ($361.6 million) and Madagascar ($214.7 million).
Put simply, the part of AGOA most tied to factory jobs (cars and clothes) is shrinking fastest. The part tied to raw and semi-processed minerals is growing. That is the reverse of what the programme was meant to achieve.
Why “Duty-Free” Is No Longer Zero
The main reason is that AGOA was designed for a world where the US most-favoured-nation tariff was the only duty that mattered. That is no longer true. AGOA eliminates the ordinary “Column 1” tariff, and that is all it eliminates. Three other layers now sit on top of it:
A worked example from US customs brokers shows the effect. On a $100,000 shipment of garments with a 16 percent general tariff, from a country in the 10 percent Section 301 tier, AGOA still saves $16,000. The importer still pays $10,000. AGOA is still worth a lot on thin-margin apparel lines, but it is now a discount, not an exemption.
Country by Country: Who Gains, Who Waits
South Africa remains AGOA’s largest user and its biggest political risk. Roughly 22 percent of South African exports to the US benefit from the programme. The trade union Solidarity puts the jobs that depend on it at half a million, a figure that should be read as an advocacy estimate rather than official data. Citrus, wine, chemicals and some auto components still gain. The vehicle trade, historically the country’s single biggest AGOA line, is blocked by Section 232. For Pretoria, the real deadline is the 2027 eligibility list, not the date in the statute. That makes the state of the US–South Africa relationship an economic question as much as a diplomatic one.
Kenya is the clearest beneficiary of the extension. Its Trade Cabinet Secretary, Lee Kinyanjui, said textiles and apparel support more than 66,000 direct jobs, most of them held by young women in the export processing zones around Nairobi, Athi River and Mombasa. Nairobi’s stated plan is to use the two-year window to move beyond garments into value-added farm products, leather, pharmaceuticals and light manufacturing. That ambition will be tested by the Section 301 layer and by Kenya’s own cost base, including an inflation rate that rose to 7.3 percent in October.
Madagascar and Mauritius show how much damage the stacked duties have already done. Modelling published in The Conversation in March 2026 estimated that tariff layering roughly halves apparel exports from AGOA countries to the US. For these two Indian Ocean producers it almost wipes them out, with estimated losses of about $128.5 million for Madagascar and $147 million for Mauritius. Industry groups in Madagascar have warned that tens of thousands of garment jobs, by some counts around 60,000, are at risk. Some Mauritian firms have cut staff or moved lines to cheaper Malagasy plants. An AGOA extension alone does not reverse those numbers.
Nigeria and the DRC show the other side of AGOA: it works best where it matters least for jobs. Nigeria’s AGOA exports are dominated by crude oil. The DRC’s recent surge is refined copper. Neither creates many manufacturing jobs, and both are commodities that would find buyers without a preference.
What Two Years Should Be Used For
The deeper lesson of 2025–26 is that a non-reciprocal, unilateral preference is a fragile foundation for industrial policy. Its continuation depends on American budget cycles, it can be withdrawn country by country, and other tariffs can quietly hollow it out. African governments have four practical uses for the window they have been given.
Conclusion
The September extension removed a cliff that was less than four months away, and that matters to the tens of thousands of workers on factory floors in Nairobi, Antananarivo and Maseru. But the programme Congress extended is not the one Africa had in 2015. US imports under AGOA have fallen by more than a third in a year. Its most job-intensive lines, apparel and vehicles, are the ones shrinking. The duties it does not remove now decide margins. AGOA has become one input into a landed-cost calculation, not the guarantee it once seemed. The countries that come out of 2028 stronger will be those that use the reprieve to make themselves less dependent on the next one.
