By Aminata Kane Balde*
Africa’s ambition for economic integration is immense. Yet the everyday experience of its entrepreneurs, travelers and producers reveals how much of the continent’s potential remains trapped behind its own borders.
There is something extraordinary about Africa’s ambition, and something profoundly disheartening about the conditions under which we are attempting to realize it. We speak of industrialization, continental trade, economic sovereignty and a common African market. Yet an entrepreneur seeking raw materials from a neighboring country may discover that importing them from Europe or Asia is cheaper, faster and considerably more predictable.
How do we develop a continent when doing business with one another is often more difficult than doing business with the rest of the world?
In July 2026, Sierra Leone hosted an ECOWAS summit in Lungi, where regional leaders renewed calls for stronger economic integration, improved infrastructure and the removal of barriers to regional trade. Nearly five decades after ECOWAS adopted its landmark 1979 Free Movement Protocol, the distance between institutional ambition and everyday experience remains enormous.
ECOWAS leaders continue to acknowledge persistent tariff and non-tariff barriers that obstruct the movement of people and goods across the region.
The distance between institutional ambition and everyday experience remains enormous.
I encounter this contradiction regularly in my work building entrepreneurial ecosystems and strengthening market systems across Africa. The journey between Freetown and Dakar remains a striking illustration of the contradictions I encounter. Travelling between these two West African capitals can involve connections through Monrovia, Accra and Lomé before finally reaching Senegal. The geography suggests proximity; the aviation network, that connects cities and remote areas across Africa, delivers an exhausting expedition at a prohibitively expensive price. Imagine the consequences for an entrepreneur transporting samples, negotiating contracts or managing operations across several countries.
Now, imagine more young Africans daring to build large-scale aviation conglomerates, mobilizing investment, technology and regional partnerships to make affordable, direct travel across Africa a reality. And the barriers that make moving people across Africa so difficult are equally evident in the movement of goods.
Africa has negotiated the African Continental Free Trade Area, one of the world’s most ambitious regional integration projects. Yet businesses still confront fragmented transport networks, inconsistent border procedures, overlapping regulations and expensive logistics. The promise of a continental market means considerably less when crossing a border can erase the commercial advantage of sourcing from a neighboring country.
Our textile industry illustrates the cost of that failure. West Africa produces cotton and celebrates its extraordinary textile traditions, yet much of the industrial value associated with African wax prints has historically been captured in Europe and, increasingly, China. Research published in 2025 documents how manufacturing shifted from Dutch-dominated supply chains towards Chinese production, while African markets remained major consumers.
We proudly wear African prints as expressions of our identity and cultural heritage, believing we are celebrating local production, while the factories, jobs and industrial wealth behind much of what we wear are created elsewhere, often in the very countries that once colonised us.
This is not an argument that Africa produces no textiles. Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and other countries have manufacturing capabilities, alongside remarkable indigenous weaving traditions. The deeper question is why cotton production, textile manufacturing, fashion, branding and continental distribution remain insufficiently connected to create competitive African-owned value chains.
Our cultural industries confront a related challenge.
Nollywood demonstrates what African storytelling can achieve. UNESCO estimates that Nigeria produces approximately 2,500 films annually, yet its assessment also identifies structural underinvestment across much of the continent’s audiovisual industry.
Beyond Nigeria, South Africa, Ghana and emerging film industries elsewhere, the potential remains immense.
Cinema is an economic industry, but it is also the infrastructure through which societies preserve memory and shape how they are understood. Who will tell the stories of our civilizations, our empires, our ancestors and our contemporary struggles if we do not invest in the institutions capable of producing, financing and distributing those stories?
The same structural weakness appears in our cities.
Informal carpentry workshops, mechanics, traders and small manufacturers sustain enormous economic activity, yet too many operate without the infrastructure, finance, technical standards or organized industrial spaces that would allow their skills to become competitive enterprises. Informality is frequently a rational response to systems that make formal participation costly and unrewarding.
Meanwhile, expanding informal settlements reveal the consequences of urbanization without sufficient planning, infrastructure or productive employment. Young Africans continue to risk dangerous migration journeys in search of opportunities that their own economies have struggled to generate.
These realities cannot be addressed through entrepreneurship programs alone.
They require an economic architecture that connects regional transport to trade, agriculture to manufacturing, education to industry, urban planning to productive employment, and cultural production to commercially viable distribution.
They also demand greater continuity in public institutions. Economic transformation requires commitments that survive changes in political leadership, institutions capable of coordinating across ministries and borders, and measurable accountability for implementation.
Africa’s difficulty is not that its ambitions are excessive. It is that we repeatedly pursue continental ambitions through fragmented national systems.
The next phase of African integration must therefore become tangible in the lives of producers and citizens: functioning trade corridors, affordable regional aviation, interoperable customs systems, industrial value chains and investment mechanisms that make African markets genuinely accessible to African businesses.
We cannot build a continental economy while leaving its connections to chance.
Africa’s emergence will depend not only on what individual countries can produce, but on what they can finally achieve together.
*Aminata Kane Balde is the Founder and Executive Chair of Craving 4 Development and Craving Ventures, and the Curator and Host of The Rise & Radiate podcast. She is also a Public Voices Fellow Tackling Poverty, a partnership of Acumen and The OpEd Project.