Martedì, Settembre 08, 2026
Desiderio Consultants Ltd. è una think tank e una rete di consulenti indipendenti esperti in sviluppo internazionale. Siamo specializzati nella promozione e orientamento delle politiche doganali, commerciali e dei trasporti nei paesi africani. Il nostro obiettivo è promuovere riforme politiche e normative che migliorino l'integrazione regionale e rafforzino la partecipazione dell'Africa alle catene di valore regionali e globali.
At the end of April 2026, the Africa Finance Corporation launched the 2026 State of Africa’s Infrastructure Report. This report offers more than a routine assessment of roads, ports, and transport infrastructure in Africa. It marks a conceptual turning point in how Africa’s development challenge is understood, arguing that the central constraint in Africa’s integration process is no longer the absence of infrastructure, but the inability to connect existing assets into functioning, integrated operational networks.
This shift in diagnosis is significant. For decades, the dominant narrative focused on infrastructure deficits: too few roads, insufficient ports, inadequate energy supply. While these gaps still exist, the report suggests that the more binding constraint today is fragmentation. Across the continent, infrastructure assets are present, yet they rarely operate as seamless supply chains. Ports are not fully integrated with inland transport networks; border processes introduce delays that undermine efficiency; logistics chains remain segmented across jurisdictions. The result is a paradox: infrastructure exists, but it does not consistently translate into functional connectivity.
The dominant feature of Africa’s logistics geography is a pronounced coastal–inland asymmetry. Most high-capacity infrastructure is concentrated along coastal export gateways, while inland regions depend on a limited number of radial corridors that connect them to these ports. Between these main axes, vast territories remain weakly connected or effectively outside the core integration network.
Taken together, this creates not a continuous continental system, but a coastalised network of trade corridors embedded in fragmented interiors. The key insight is therefore not purely geographical, but one of network topology: Africa’s infrastructure system functions as a set of strong, corridor-based links separated by weak connective tissue.
It is precisely this structural configuration that explains why the report emphasises the persistence of physical bottlenecks. Even where major corridors exist, they remain discontinuous. The Lagos–Abidjan axis still faces critical gaps, while key rail systems across the Northern and North–South corridors require significant rehabilitation. These discontinuities reinforce the underlying fragmentation and prevent the emergence of truly integrated, continent-wide trade routes capable of supporting the ambitions of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
Energy represents another dimension of the structural challenges of Africa. The report highlights that Africa remains a net exporter of crude oil, yet imports more than 70 percent of its refined fuel. This exposes the continent to external price volatility and supply disruptions, but more importantly, it reflects a deeper systemic issue: the absence of integrated industrial and energy ecosystems. Without domestic processing capacity, Africa remains locked into a pattern where value is created elsewhere.
A similar pattern emerges in the digital sphere. Connectivity is expanding rapidly, but a large gap remains between access and effective use. The report identifies a 64 percent “usage gap” pointing to the absence of what it calls the “missing middle”: the platforms, skills, and institutional linkages needed to translate connectivity into productivity. In other words, digital infrastructure is growing, but it is not yet fully embedded within economic systems.
Against this backdrop, the report reframes the requirements for advancing integration under the AfCFTA. The emphasis shifts from building isolated assets to constructing integrated ecosystems that connect energy, transport, and production to markets.
One of the most important implications concerns financing. As external funding becomes less predictable, the report calls for a greater reliance on domestic resources. Africa’s financial system holds substantial capital (estimated at around $4 trillion) but much of it remains concentrated in short-term instruments such as government securities. The challenge is therefore not simply mobilising capital, but redirecting it toward long-term infrastructure investment through more effective financial intermediation and regulatory reform.
The report also places strong emphasis on the development of integrated trade corridors. What matters is no longer the existence of individual infrastructure assets, but the degree to which they are functionally connected. In this context, aviation is highlighted as a particularly powerful lever. The full implementation of the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) could significantly enhance mobility, generating millions of additional passenger trips and tens of thousands of jobs, while accelerating the integration of markets across the continent.
Energy integration is presented not only as a technical necessity, but as a foundation for industrial transformation. Strengthening regional power pools such as the Southern African Power Pool and the Eastern Africa Power Pool would allow countries to optimise resources, reduce costs, and improve reliability. At the same time, the report underscores the importance of moving beyond raw material exports toward domestic value addition, including refining, fertilizer production, and mineral processing. Without this shift, infrastructure improvements alone will not translate into broader economic transformation.
Digital infrastructure, finally, must evolve from connectivity to productivity systems. This requires integrating digital platforms with logistics, energy, and production networks, as well as investing in the skills needed to support this transition. The objective is not simply to connect people, but to embed digital tools within the functioning of economic systems.
Africa’s infrastructure challenge is no longer about building more, but about making what already exists finally function as one system. This requires a decisive reorientation of policy: from isolated projects to integrated systems, from fragmented investments to coordinated, continent-wide architectures that transform infrastructure from static assets into living functionality. In this sense, the 2026 State of Africa’s Infrastructure Report goes beyond diagnosis. It sets out a new way of thinking about development and continental integration in which progress depends less on construction and more on the capacity to integrate, align, and orchestrate dispersed systems into a coherent continental system.
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