The African Union agreed in 2019 to establish the African Continental Free Trade Area founded on the building blocks laid by eight regional economic communities. These are the Arab Maghreb Union, the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa), the Community of Sahel-Saharan States (Cen-Sad), the East African Community (EAC), the Economic Community of Central African States (Eccas), the Economic Community of West African States (Ecowas), the Intergovernmental Authority on Development (IGAD) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC).

But integration has made slow progress.

The World Bank issued a report 45 years ago which said a larger regional market would increase production and reduce “long-term obstacles to development”. Those obstacles included infrastructure deficits, payment and settlement systems, and political risk.

They persist to this day. Based on my research over more than three decades of work on regionalism in Africa, I suggest there are four main reasons why.

• Integration experiments suffer from colonial dependency.

• Integration has failed to address the informal nature of enterprise in Africa.

• African countries do integration as an add-on to pre-existing colonial arrangements, instead of re-imagining them.

• Regional integration in Africa has been burdened by mission creep, which makes its goals unclear.

I argue that institutions created by Africa’s leaders for this purpose must facilitate the continent as a space in which every African can thrive and diminish the tendency for national politics to trump shared progress.

The burden of colonial dependency

At the conclusion of the Berlin West Africa Conference in February 1885, European powers and the United States of America appointed themselves “to regulate the conditions most favourable to the development of trade and civilization … in Africa.”

In 1973, a pioneering study of Foreign Investments in the East African Common Market concluded that most of Africa’s post-colonial regional integration arrangements were “based on pre-independence links and institutions.”

For instance, the East African Common Market was successor to Britain’s colonial East African Federation and precursor of today’s East African Community. The Community’s recent effort to expand beyond this original geography has come at the price of cohesion, which endangers it.

Ecowas was the first to transcend patterns of colonial dependency. Uniquely, it included countries that won their independence from France, Portugal and the United Kingdom. Fifty years after Ecowas was founded, recent developments suggest the experience continues to be uneasy.

One reason for this is because the post-colonial association or partnership agreements between the European Union and African, Caribbean and Pacific countries is designed to farm and extract goods that are sent to be processed in Europe. From there, African countries import the processed goods at higher prices. This makes it impossible for Africa to grow industries that can employ its own people to process what it produces.

Informal nature of business activity

Around Africa, colonial rule thrived by routing or taking over indigenous enterprise. Those who survived it did so by going underground or operating informally. Since independence, most governments in the continent have failed to redress this historical pattern criminalising African enterprise.

As recently as 2023, the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa estimated informal cross-border trade in Africa at “between 30% and 72% of formal trade between neighbouring countries.” This excludes a huge proportion of African enterprise from the benefits of regional integration.

Integration as an add on, instead of a shared future

African countries continue to enter into regional integration not to re-imagine but as add-ons to pre-existing colonial arrangements. Recent estimates put the number of these arrangements at over 156. For a continent of 55 countries, this means confounding overlaps of both membership and mission.

In response, many have advocated rationalisation of Africa’s regional integration arrangements.

The AU’s decision to recognise eight regional economic communities was supposed to respond to this. But it has not eliminated the overlaps. For instance, Tanzania and the DRC respectively belong to the EAC and SADC. Eritrea and Sudan were simultaneously in the IGAD, Comesa, and Cen-Sad. French-speaking west African countries belong to both Ecowas and the Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa, better known as l’UEMOA.

What needs to happen next

Popular resentment against continuing colonial projects in parts of Africa may be high but it requires political imagination to transform that into constructive energy.

Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger exited Ecowas following rupture in relations with the colonial power, France. However, they still belong to l’UEMOA, whose currency system is backed by France.

It will take more than formal rules of market access or tax harmonisation to shrink informal trade. Women, for example, do over 70% of informal cross-border trade in Africa. An effective solution to this problem will require better frontier regimes and eliminate policies that discourage women from lawful enterprise.

Addressing mission creep

Rationalisation of Africa’s integration arrangements may already be quietly underway. Much of the focus is on membership overlaps. Since 2000, for instance, Ecowas has lost 25% of its membership, reducing it from 16 to 12 member states. Rwanda has withdrawn from Eccas and Eritrea from IGAD.

But the problem may be lack of clarity in the mission of Africa’s integration arrangements. In addition to economic issues, Africa’s regional integration regimes have also assumed burdens of collective security and governance oversight. The outcomes have been both unconvincing and destabilising. The exit in 2025 of Burkina Faso, Mali, and Niger from Ecowas is a recent example.

Without a clear political commitment to a shared future, Africa’s governments have been unable to manage the contradictions between economic integration, collective security and governance in one mission. The time has come for them to decide what they must prioritise so that regional integration in Africa will finally get the opportunity to prove and improve the continent’s prospects.

Written by Chidi Anselm Odinkalu, Professor of Practice, International Human Rights Law, Tufts University

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