Rethinking African Integration: From The Integration Ladder To Modular Convergence – OpEd
Key Takeaways
- Measuring Africa’s integration process against the experience of mid-20th-century Western Europe risks imposing an inappropriate benchmark on a fundamentally different historical, economic and institutional context.
- Western European integration developed within a context of relatively dense industrial and infrastructure networks, strong intra-regional trade links and comparatively short distances between major economic centres.
- For Africa, the priority should be to build the functional foundations of integration (strengthening logistics corridors, digitising border processes, connecting energy systems and improving cross-border infrastructure and data interoperability), while progressively advancing legal and institutional convergence.
The debate on African integration needs to be reframed. For too long, the continent’s integration process has been judged against the Balassian model of economic integration, which conceives regional integration as a linear process evolving from free trade areas to customs unions, common markets, monetary unions and, ultimately, economic and political union. Despite its elegance, this sequence emerged from a political, economic and social context fundamentally different from that of post-colonial Africa. The conditions that made the model work in post-war Western Europe cannot simply be transplanted onto a continent of 55 states, uneven institutional capacities, fragmented infrastructure, vast geographical distances and highly diverse legal, economic and policy environments. Yet as Africa has encountered delays in progressing along this prescribed path, the simplistic conclusion has too often been that African regional integration is failing.
In my recent paper, Rethinking African Regional Integration, published by the Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute (HESPI), I ask a more fundamental question: what if the problem is not that Africa has failed to climb the integration ladder, but that we have mistaken the ladder for the destination?
That question leads to a radically different proposition for Africa. Rather than viewing the continent’s integration as a single ladder that all countries must climb in the same predetermined order, I propose understanding it as a process of modular convergence: a functional and spatial model in which integration emerges through the gradual connection of corridors, markets, border systems, infrastructure networks and digital platforms. In this view, integration does not have to begin with a continent-wide political or legal architecture. It can begin where economic life already exists: at borders, along transport corridors, around logistics hubs, between neighbouring markets and within emerging regional value chains.
This shift matters because the conventional narrative has long revolved around an apparent African integration paradox. Governments sign ambitious treaties, establish regional economic communities and adopt continental frameworks, yet trade remains constrained by poor infrastructure, high logistics costs, non-tariff barriers, fragmented customs procedures and weak productive capacity. The standard (and simplistic) response is to point to an “implementation gap”: the distance between what African governments have agreed on paper and what they have delivered in practice. But my argument goes deeper. Perhaps Africa’s integration is not failing at all; perhaps we have simply been looking for it in the wrong places and measuring it through the wrong lens.
The Balassian framework assumes that removing tariff and non-tariff barriers and harmonising legal frameworks, including through the progressive transfer of portions of national sovereignty to supranational institutions, will unlock deeper stages of economic integration. The formal removal of barriers and progressive legal convergence may indeed create the conditions for integration, but they do not necessarily generate the economic connections that integration is ultimately meant to produce. A country can share a common legal framework with its neighbours and still remain economically disconnected from them. A trader may enjoy formal market access but lack the transport infrastructure, logistics networks or financial systems needed to reach that market. A manufacturer may have access to preferential trade arrangements and neighbouring inputs but no reliable corridor through which those inputs can move efficiently. Two customs administrations may operate under broadly harmonised rules yet remain unable to exchange data or coordinate their procedures in real time. This is precisely the paradox that characterises much of Africa’s integration experience: integration has advanced institutionally, while remaining comparatively weak in practice, with legal and regulatory convergence often running ahead of the actual circulation of goods, services, capital, people and information.
This is where my concept of systemic interoperability becomes central. The question is no longer simply whether African countries have harmonised their laws or signed the right agreements. It is whether their systems can actually work together. Can customs administrations exchange data? Can electronic documents be recognised across borders? Can national single windows communicate with one another? Can border agencies coordinate their procedures? Can transport corridors operate as integrated economic systems? Can regional value chains connect production across national boundaries? Integration, in this sense, is not achieved when systems become identical; it is achieved when different systems become capable of working together.
Seen from this perspective, the much-criticised overlap between Africa’s Regional Economic Communities looks different. The conventional view treats the coexistence of institutions such as ECOWAS, EAC, SADC and COMESA as a “spaghetti bowl” that should eventually be rationalised or dismantled. I try to offer a more nuanced interpretation of this phenomenon. These overlapping structures are not necessarily evidence of institutional failure. They reflect the geography of economic life, historical relationships and the fact that countries often integrate first with those neighbours with whom they have the strongest functional connections.
This is the logic behind modular convergence. Integration can advance through specific, self-reinforcing modules: a trade corridor linking two or more markets, a regional power pool, a cross-border infrastructure project such as a One Stop Border Post (OSBP), a corridor coordination structure or a digital interface among customs platforms. These modules do not need to wait for countries to sign comprehensive treaties or reach the same level of integration. They emerge where the conditions are most favourable and where there is a concrete need to address a shared problem, allowing practical cooperation to deepen incrementally and individual modules to connect with and reinforce one another over time.
The implication for the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) is equally significant. The AfCFTA is not a supranational structure intended to gradually replace the continent’s regional arrangements. It instead functions as a “coordination and interoperability layer”, helping different regional systems connect with one another without requiring them to become necessarily identical. Seen from this perspective, its role should not be understood as an agreement imposing uniformity, but as a supraregional framework designed to enable the circulation of goods, services, capital, people, energy, data and production networks across Africa’s diverse and often disconnected economic spaces. These spaces are separated not only by physical distance and infrastructure gaps, but also by differences in institutional systems, business practices, languages, cultures, historical ties and patterns of economic interaction. Its purpose is therefore not to erase the diversity of Africa’s regional economies, but to make that diversity more capable of interacting. This requires recognising that integration is driven by interlocking functional domains, shaped by operational necessity and emergent opportunities for cooperation across space. The AfCFTA can thus provide an overarching framework within which these different domains, networks and regional systems can progressively connect, interact and reinforce one another, allowing integration to emerge not through uniformity, but through increasing interoperability among diverse economic spaces.
I believe that one of the paper’s most important contributions is its attempt to connect theory with the operational realities of trade. It moves the debate beyond the familiar diagnosis of “lack of political will” towards a more systemic understanding of why integration succeeds in some places and stalls in others. It also challenges the tendency to view informal cross-border trade as an anomaly or simply as a problem to be eliminated. Where formal border governance is characterised by procedural uncertainty, bureaucratic complexity and discretionary enforcement, traders gradually form expectations that formal channels are unreliable or excessively risky. Through repeated interactions and social transmission within trader networks and border communities, these experiences become shared knowledge, while informal strategies that appear to offer greater predictability are observed, imitated and reinforced. Informality thus becomes more than an individual response to high costs or bureaucratic complexity: it evolves into a socially learned and self-reinforcing equilibrium in which informal practices become the rational and normalised way of navigating the border environment. This is what I describe as informality as “socially learned” behaviour”. The policy challenge, therefore, is to create the conditions under which traders can progressively formalise through simplified procedures, incentives, digital tools and better access to regional markets.
Corridor-based and modular integration may reinforce existing asymmetries if investment and economic activity become concentrated in larger economies and commercially attractive routes, potentially leaving smaller, landlocked and fragile states at the margins of emerging regional networks. There is also a risk that successful modules of integration remain disconnected from one another, creating “islands of integration” rather than progressively interconnected regional systems. Nor is interoperability costless. Connecting customs systems, developing digital infrastructure and establishing effective cross-border institutions require substantial financial resources, technical capacity and sustained political commitment. A non-linear model of integration may therefore demand more sophisticated governance, not less: governance capable of connecting and scaling individual modules, preventing them from becoming isolated islands, and ensuring that the benefits of connectivity extend beyond the most commercially advantageous corridors and economies.
The most important question for Africa may no longer be how quickly the continent can climb the integration ladder. It may be whether the continent can build enough bridges between the systems that already exist.
That is the real intellectual break in my argument. African integration does not have to wait for 55 countries to move through the same stages or along the same path. It can emerge from the bottom up, through corridors that begin to function, borders that begin to disappear in practice, digital systems that begin to communicate and production networks that begin to cross national boundaries. The continent does not need to become one system before its sub-systems can integrate. It needs to make its many systems capable of working together.
Africa’s integration will not be built by forcing the continent to climb a single ladder. It will be built by connecting the steps that already exist.
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