What Is the Future of U.S.-Africa Trade Policy?

Zainab Usman is a senior fellow and director of the Africa Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, D.C. Her fields of expertise include institutions, economic policy, energy policy, and emerging economies in Africa.

is a professor in practice and the strategic director at the London School of Economics Firoz Lalji Institute for Africa, where he oversees their program on African trade. He is the former director of the African Trade Policy Centre at the UN Economic Commission for Africa, where he led the technical work on the AfCFTA agreement. His research interests include boosting intra-African trade; the AfCFTA initiative; Africa’s multilateral and bilateral trade relationships; and how trade policy intersects with industrialization, structural transformation, gender, public health, and climate change.

is the president and CEO of the Corporate Council on Africa (CCA). Liser joined the CCA from the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR), where she led trade and investment policy toward forty-nine African nations and oversaw implementation of the African Growth and Opportunity Act. While with the USTR, she served as the assistant U.S. trade representative for Africa; assistant U.S. trade representative for industry, market access, and telecommunications; and director of the USTR’s Office of General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade Affairs. She also served as the senior trade policy adviser in the Office of International Transportation and Trade at the Department of Transportation and an associate fellow at the Overseas Development Council.

is a lawyer and international affairs consultant in Washington, DC. He is founding managing director of Acorus Capital, a private equity fund investing in Africa, and senior adviser of Manchester Trade, Ltd., a Washington, DC-based trade policy and investment advisory firm. He began his work in Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer in Botswana from 1976 to 1978 and returned to the agency to serve as assistant general counsel from 1986 to 1989. Since then, he has advised organizations including the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development, and other bilateral development organizations. He was instrumental in the design and passage of the Africa Growth and Opportunity Act, the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, and more recently the Global HOPE Bill. He is a current board member at the Woodrow Wilson Center’s Africa program. Formerly, he served as a senior associate at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a charter member for the at the U.S. Trade Representative’s Trade Advisory Committee on Africa, and an adjunct professor of African Studies at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies.