Africa’s Integration Paradox: Why Trading Abroad Is Easier Than Next Door

By Sheena Raikundalia

Last year, Kenya’s delegation to the Intra-African Trade Fair in Algiers went by way of Paris. The trip took fifteen hours, for a journey a direct flight would have made in six. The irony wrote itself: African officials, en route to a trade fair meant to promote trade among African countries, routed through the capital of the former colonial power.

I thought about that journey last week, when I moderated a panel on African competitiveness for the Kenya National Chamber of Commerce and Industry (KNCCI). The anecdote is amusing. The reality behind it is not.

An Impressive Blueprint

It is not that Africa has failed to plan. Since the Organization of African Unity was founded in 1963, the continent has built a formidable institutional architecture:

• Regional blocs, beginning with the East African Community (1967) and the Economic Community of West African States (1975)
• The African Union (2002)
• The African Continental Free Trade Area, or AfCFTA (2018)
• The Single African Air Transport Market, or SAATM (2018)
• The Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, or PAPSS, designed to let Africans trade in their own currencies (2022)

On paper, this is a continent wired for commerce. In practice, the wiring is barely connected.

The Numbers Tell the Story

Less than a fifth of Africa’s trade is with other African countries. Within the European Union, the figure is above 60 percent. Africans, in other words, buy from and sell to the rest of the world far more readily than to one another.

The costs of this are concrete. An estimated Ksh 645 billion (US$5 billion) a year is lost to currency conversion, much of it because African traders must route payments through foreign currencies to settle with a customer a few hundred miles away. The air-travel detour to Algiers is the same problem in miniature: infrastructure that exists in treaties but not on timetables.

What Europe Understood

It is tempting to say Europe had it easier. It did not. France and Germany fought three wars between 1870 and 1945. Yet just six years after the Second World War ended, they joined four other countries to pool their coal and steel, the industries underpinning their industrial and military power.

They did not do so out of sentiment. They did it because they recognized that their futures were connected, and that sharing control of the commodities of war made another war materially harder to wage. Integration began as hard-headed self-interest.

The question for Africa is what it will take to reach the same realization.

The Price of Dependence

The evidence is accumulating, and it is expensive. COVID-19 exposed what it means to depend on others for vaccines. Five years later, Africa still imports around 99 percent of the vaccines it uses. When the Strait of Hormuz closed in February, the price of urea, a key fertilizer, rose 82 percent in two months. Farmers a continent away from the dispute paid for it in their input costs.

Now picture a 19-year-old African entering the workforce today. He needs food, housing, electricity, medicine, technology and a job. Who will produce them? Where will the factories be?

Building, and Keeping, Capacity

There are signs of ambition. Dangote’s refinery in Nigeria shows what it looks like to build industrial capacity that can serve markets beyond a single country. There are also warnings. Microsoft’s reported plans to wind down its Nairobi engineering center, following the closure of its Lagos center in 2024, show how easily high-value capability can leave.

Both examples raise the same question: what productive capacity does Africa want to build, and what will it take to keep it?

No one is suggesting that every country can manufacture everything. But it is hard to argue that African countries can build more apart than together. A larger market, shared infrastructure and pooled investment make factories viable that no single economy could sustain alone. That is the logic of the AfCFTA, if it is allowed to work.

The Clock is Running

By 2050, one in four people on earth will be African. The continent’s median age is 19. We have spent 63 years negotiating the idea of integration. A generation of this size and youth cannot afford to wait another 63.

The institutions exist. The treaties are signed. What remains is the harder work of making them real: direct flights, working payment rails, open borders for goods, and the political will to put continental interests alongside national ones.

So the question stands, and it is one for governments, businesses and citizens alike: what will it take for Africa to do business with itself?

Sheena Raikundalia is an accomplished entrepreneur, former lawyer, government policy advisor, and angel investor with deep expertise across the legal, financial services, and impact investment sectors in Europe and Africa. She has played a pivotal role in advancing Africa’s technology and innovation ecosystems, leveraging a career that spans top-tier London law firms, leadership as Country Director of the UK-Kenya Tech Hub for the UK Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO), and her current position as Chief Growth Officer at agri-tech company Kuza One. Sheena is recognized for her strategic vision, commitment to fostering innovation, and strong advocacy for Africa’s growth potential in technology, entrepreneurship, and impact investment.