The Method Behind The Number
Nothing here is a black box. This page sets out exactly what the index measures, why some pillars weigh more than others, why your score can be capped no matter how well you do elsewhere, and the two answers that stop the assessment rather than scoring you. If you disagree with the reasoning, you will be able to say precisely where.
The AERI measures one thing: whether your business can actually complete a cross-border trade under AfCFTA. Not whether you want to. Not whether the opportunity exists. Whether the customs officer, the bank, the freight forwarder, and the buyer on the other side would each find what they need when they look.
Every export failure traces back to one of four questions. Can the goods lawfully cross? Will you be paid? Can you deliver? And is the party you are dealing with real? The AERI is built around those four questions.
The AERI is a Readiness Indicator, not a risk rating. It is computed from your own unverified answers, so it is not a credit score, does not predict default, and is not legal, customs, or financial advice. It measures institutional export readiness: how closely your business meets the documentation, compliance, and commercial expectations of the parties who decide whether your goods move. Confirm your product classification and origin position with your customs authority or a licensed clearing agent before acting on anything the assessment tells you.
The index assesses 39 dimensions across ten pillars: Export Compliance and Origin, Trade Finance and Payment, Product and Production, Logistics and Supply Chain, Market and Entry, FX and Financial Resilience, Organisational Capability, Counterparty and Cross-Border Risk, Digital and Data, and Sustainability and After-Sales. Your business fundamentals are also assessed and blended in, because a business that cannot run itself cannot export competently no matter how good its paperwork is.
The pillars are deliberately not equally weighted. Weight follows consequence, and consequence is not a matter of opinion here: rules of origin are a legal precondition written into the AfCFTA treaty, and a website is not. Compliance and origin therefore carries more weight than digital presence, by a wide margin. The specific weight values are ASAP Information Services’ proprietary methodology and are not published.
A weighted average cannot see a gate. A business could otherwise score well while failing a condition that makes trade impossible, and averaging that away would be dishonest. So the AERI applies caps: for missing customs registration, for an unconfirmed rules of origin position, for a missing mandatory certification, and for having no way to receive a cross-border payment.
A capped result always shows both numbers, the cap and what your score would have been. The distance between them is not a punishment. It is a price tag on the single gate standing in front of you, and it is usually the most useful number on the page.
Six bands. Not Export Ready (0 to 19): no legal capacity to export today, which is a separate question from whether the business is any good. Early Stage (20 to 39): interest without infrastructure; the gaps are foundational and sequence is the constraint, not ambition. Developing Exporter (40 to 54): legally capable, commercially unprepared, and this is where most first-time exporters actually sit and where most avoidable losses happen. Export Capable (55 to 69): can complete a transaction end to end without failing. AfCFTA Ready (70 to 84): Export Capable, plus a confirmed origin position, meaning you are actually claiming the tariff preference rather than qualifying for it in theory. Export Leader (85 to 100): multi-market, resilient, institutionally credible.
AfCFTA Ready is a deliberate threshold, not a compliment. A business that ships competently but has never confirmed its rules of origin position is held at Export Capable, however impressive it otherwise looks, because it is almost certainly paying duty it does not need to pay.
Two answers end the assessment rather than producing a number. If your goods may be restricted, licensed, or connected to a sanctioned party, no score would be responsible; that needs specialist advice, and putting a number on it would imply the problem could be worked around. And if you sell services rather than goods, the AERI version 1 does not apply: scoring a services business against rules of origin and packaging requirements would produce a result that means nothing. We would rather say so than hand you a misleading number. A services track is planned.
Most export readiness assessments will tell a business with perfect documentation and no buyer that it is ready. It is not. And a business that has found a buyer but cannot verify them is not ready either, in a way that is far more expensive. Across a border, you cannot drive to their premises, you cannot read their registry, and you cannot practically reach their courts. A registration number proves a company was formed once. It does not prove it is trading, solvent, owned by who it claims, or still in business this month.
That is why Counterparty Visibility is reported as a risk indicator in its own right, and why the assessment weights having a confirmed buyer more heavily than any other single question in the instrument. The exporters who lose money on a first shipment rarely lose it on the product. They lose it on the person.
Your AERI score is only as honest as your answers, which is why it is labelled a Readiness Indicator. Real counterparties verify. ASAP Information Services performs that verification professionally, on your business and on theirs: registration and ownership confirmed at source, trading status, directors, adverse records, payment behaviour, and confirmation that a company physically operates. If the assessment surfaced gaps, that is where closing them starts to count.
