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A garment worker in Lesotho's textile sector, which makes up roughly 80% of the country’s exports to the United States, spends her morning stitching apparel bound for a U.S. retailer. This worker and roughly 40,000 others in the apparel sector, along with tens of thousands more in Kenya, Madagascar, and Eswatini, build their lives around a law Congress just extended — but only for two more years.
AGOA’s renewal has provided these workers with some stability. The act lapsed on September 30, 2025, and remained so for four months. Congress passed a retroactive extension in February 2026 that ran only to the end of that year. In early September 2026, the U.S. government signed another extension through December 31, 2028. The program's existing terms, including the third-country fabric provision that apparel exporters rely on, now run until then.
The extension is welcome, but it is not enough. The Office of the U.S. Trade Representative (USTR) signaled that it is working to modernize the program to fit the administration’s “America First” trade policy. Central to this debate is AGOA’s rules-of-origin standard, which determines the product’s country of origin. The extension has bought Congress time to get the reform right. This matters for Congress because the outcome will determine whether the administration’s framework for Africa’s engagement is “trade over aid.”
Why a Two-Year Extension Is Not Enough
Two years is still too short for the investment AGOA is intended to attract, as factories, mills, and sourcing contracts are planned over many years. In public comments to USTR, U.S. companies and African organizations alike asked for a 10- to 15-year reauthorization. As one analyst says, the shorter window "perpetuates uncertainty, making long-term investment difficult."
The extension also leaves untouched the tariffs that have eroded AGOA’s duty-free promise. Research shows that even with AGOA in place, eligible countries face a 9.2% rise in their trade-weighted average U.S. tariff following the Trump administration’s April 2025 tariff. Imports that actually entered duty-free under AGOA declined from $7.9 billion in 2024 to $5 billion in 2025.
Kenya shows the cost of uncertainty. In 2025, Kenyan factories exported 148 million apparel pieces to the United States, up from 27.6% in 2024. Yet export value fell to 4.1% as buyers pushed toward lower-value goods amid weak demand and aggressive price competition. Regardless, AGOA-linked employment grew by 22.8% to 82,000.
AGOA requires a general 35% regional value content threshold — high for some African economies — and its "third-country fabric provision" lets less-developed beneficiary countries use fabric of any origin, including Chinese fabric, while still qualifying for U.S. duty-free treatment. This provision has been essential to the continent's real gains in apparel manufacturing, so the fix is not to eliminate it but to raise minimum value-add thresholds while explicitly permitting cumulation from all African states. Cumulation is a trade provision that allows products from one country to be added to or further processed in another country and treated as though they originate there.
West Africa’s cotton industry illustrates why cumulation, not elimination, is the better fix. The region produces roughly 2 million tonnes of cotton, yet roughly 90% is shipped to Asian manufacturers for processing rather than turned into finished goods locally. Allowing a Ghanaian mill to count toward a Kenyan garment maker's local-content threshold, as the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) permits, gives that cotton a path to regional processing without stripping away the flexibility that let AGOA's apparel sector grow in the first place. Local leadership in setting rules-of-origin standards, not just implementing standards set in Washington, will make reform durable and credible.
African institutions have already shown that they can design local-content rules on their own terms. The Council of African Trade Ministers agreed on a rules-of-origin framework for automotive parts under the AfCFTA. This rule requires vehicles to contain at least 40% African-origin content, with a built-in five-year review to adjust any thresholds as the continent’s capacity grows. Though this may be separate from AGOA, it shows that African institutions can create credible, enforceable local-content standards.
The current AGOA reform process should not run through a U.S-only comment period, as the outcome will be disjointed from Africa’s reality. Finalizing rules of origin without the continent’s input would repeat the top-down approach that “trade over aid” claims to be moving away from, only embedded in trade law.
Does AGOA Still Matter?
Some African officials and analysts question whether AGOA deserves the attention it receives. In 2025, the United States imported $33.7 billion in goods from sub-Saharan African countries, but only $5 billion of that, roughly 15%, entered duty-free under AGOA. On average, only five countries account for 89% of AGOA imports. The United States supplies only about 5% of the region's imports, compared with 19% from China. With China offering zero-tariff access and the AfCFTA expanding Africa's own market, it is reasonable to ask why African governments should spend scarce negotiating capital in Washington.
In my view, the headline share understates AGOA's impact. Most U.S. imports from eligible countries are fuels, metals, and raw agricultural materials that would reach the U.S. market anyway. AGOA's value lies in the narrower band of manufactured and processed goods, such as apparel and vehicles, that African countries need to move up the value chain, and its benefits fall on the countries least able to absorb their loss. The United Nations Trade and Development body found that without AGOA, exporters such as Lesotho, Kenya, Madagascar, and Tanzania would see their average tariffs rise to 20% or higher. For a factory in Maseru, a program worth a modest share of continental trade can be the difference between a new order and a round of layoffs.
However, the critics are right: AGOA should not be the ceiling for U.S.-Africa economic relations and, as currently designed, it does very little for regional integration — a weakness the U.S. International Trade Commission has itself noted. This alone is reason enough to reform AGOA around the AfCFTA, not to neglect it. A rules-of-origin regime that counts input from across the continent would spread AGOA’s benefits beyond its top five beneficiaries while tying U.S. market access to regional markets.
How Congress Can Build a Better AGOA
Here are four ways the U.S. Congress can use the extension window to build a better AGOA:
- The House Ways and Means Committee and Senate Finance Committee should begin working toward long-term AGOA reauthorization, ideally for more than 10 years, to provide stability, predictability, and trust.
- The USTR and subcommittees on trade and international trade, customs, and global competitiveness should jointly engage in a formal, structured consultation with African trade institutions, specifically the AfCFTA Secretariat and relevant regional economic communities, before finalizing any new rules-of-origin thresholds. Congress can build this requirement directly into reauthorizing legislation, making consultation a statutory condition rather than a discretionary courtesy.
- Congress should raise AGOA's local-content thresholds gradually and permit cumulation among AfCFTA member states, so inputs from other African countries count toward a producer's local-content requirement. This will let manufacturers deepen regional supply chains at their own pace, rather than face an abrupt cutoff to the third-country fabric provision that current exporters still depend on.
- The House Appropriations Subcommittee on State, Foreign Operations, and Related Programs should pair any rules-of-origin reform with targeted funding for regional trade and investment hubs, similar to those previously supported through the U.S. Agency for International Development, since these hubs help American businesses find African partners and help African producers meet stricter local-content standards.
Conclusion
Congress built AGOA to increase U.S.-African trade and encourage market-oriented reform, not to leave African manufacturers permanently dependent on non-African inputs, including Chinese ones. The two-year extension removes the immediate cliff edge, but the choice ahead is not simply whether to keep AGOA alive. It is whether Congress uses the next two years to design the next chapter of U.S.-Africa trade policy with African institutions at the table. A long-term reauthorization built around a cumulation-based rules-of-origin reform, negotiated with African trade bodies, would strengthen American manufacturing interests, deepen African regional supply chains, and give Lesotho's garment workers and millions like them across the continent the stability to plan a future around American trade policy rather than brace for its next expiration.
This paper series was published in collaboration with the Heinrich Böll Foundation, Washington D.C.
