["Review of Development Economics, EarlyView. ", "\nABSTRACT\nIn the lead up to African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), intra‐African trade was limited and exports from Africa to the rest of the world were dominated by commodities, resulting in meager benefits being derived from both regional and international trade. The African Union implemented AfCFTA in 2021 by progressively eliminating tariffs and lowering nontariff barriers in member states. Its intention was to boost economic growth, increase trade in value added production, create jobs, reduce poverty, and enhance competitiveness. This study provides one of the earliest quantitative analyses of the ex‐post impacts of AfCFTA on intra‐regional trade in East Africa by employing a gravity model with an unbalanced panel, analyzed using the Hausman–Taylor estimator to account for inherent endogeneity. Data on intra‐regional trade of maize, coffee and tea from 2000 to 2022 were collected for seven East African countries. Results reveal that membership of AfCFTA reduced trade between East African countries, potentially in favor of new trade linkages with other African countries outside of East Africa. Short‐ and long‐run impacts of AfCFTA are more pronounced in maize and tea trade than in coffee trade. In general, tariffs had no significant impacts on intra‐regional trade, but lowering nontariff barriers increased intra‐regional trade, aligning with studies that have concluded that nontariff barriers were more costly to international trade than tariffs. These results provide early insights that the impacts of AfCFTA can be commodity‐specific, and that the direction of intra‐regional trade impacts within the continent and at subcontinental level may differ significantly.\n"]