Beyond Market Access: Regional Integration as the Emerging Architecture of African Resilience

A growing body of literature on African integration is beginning to reinterpret African regionalism not simply as a trade liberalisation project, but increasingly as a resilience governance tool. This conceptual shift has accelerated in the aftermath of COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, climate disruptions, and the recent supply chain shocks linked to instability in the Middle East, all of which exposed the fragility of fragmented markets, transit dependency, and externally dependent logistics systems across the continent. A recent UN study on African landlocked least developed countries (LLDCs) reflects this evolving direction quite clearly. One of its most interesting contributions is that it connects regional value chains, trade facilitation, digital trade, corridor governance, and resilience strategies within a single analytical framework. Rather than treating these as isolated policy domains, the report presents them as interconnected dimensions of economic resilience and structural transformation.

The study is far more infrastructure- and corridor-oriented than much conventional African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) literature. It treats One Stop Border Posts (OSBPs), transit agreements, logistics systems, customs modernisation, paperless trade, and digital trade facilitation as strategic components of industrialisation, market integration, and economic resilience. In this sense, the report reflects a broader evolution in African trade policy thinking: infrastructure and logistics are increasingly understood not merely as supporting mechanisms for trade, but as governance systems shaping competitiveness, resilience, and regional interdependence.

For African LLDCs, this issue is profoundly geopolitical. These economies are not simply trade-dependent; they are structurally exposed to the domestic politics, regulatory instability, infrastructure failures, and security disruptions of transit neighbours. Their economic sovereignty is therefore partially mediated through corridors they do not fully control. In practice, the “sovereignty of corridors” is becoming almost as important as territorial sovereignty itself. A disruption at a port, border crossing, transit regime, or transport corridor can rapidly transmit inflationary pressures, food insecurity, industrial shortages, and fiscal stress across entire landlocked economies.

Interestingly, this emerging resilience-oriented literature aligns with a "functional" reinterpretation of African integration that we have proposed in this paper. The functional integration theory argues that integration in Africa is advancing not only through treaties, tariff reductions, or formal policy commitments, but increasingly through the operational necessity of managing shared vulnerabilities within deeply interconnected systems. Climate shocks, corridor disruptions, food insecurity, supply-chain fragmentation, and energy interdependence are creating systemic pressures that individual states can no longer manage in isolation. As a result, they are being pushed toward new forms of coordination gravitating around shared interests, ranging from corridor management authorities and security cooperation arrangements to broader institutional mechanisms that progressively expand their scope to include trade-related areas and deeper forms of economic integration.

Resilience governance, in this sense, becomes itself a functional driver of integration. Mechanisms such as OSBPs, customs interoperability, regional power pools, transit systems, paperless trade platforms, and corridor governance frameworks increasingly constitute the operational infrastructure through which regional integration is materialising in practice.

At the same time, many of the report’s core conclusions are not fundamentally new. The study reiterates longstanding arguments in African integration literature: the need for deeper regional integration, the persistence of non-tariff barriers, the importance of trade facilitation, the underdevelopment of regional value chains, the constraints imposed by infrastructure gaps, the opportunities associated with digital trade, and the centrality of effective AfCFTA implementation.

What this persistence ultimately reveals is a more fundamental reality: Africa’s integration challenge is no longer about understanding the problem, but about building the institutions to act on it. The policy solutions are largely known and repeatedly restated. What is missing is the governance machinery capable of translating these well-known solutions into consistent and coordinated implementation across countries. This is not simply a question of political will. It reflects a deeper institutional gap: the absence of supranational governance systems with enough authority, capacity, and coordination tools to turn agreed reforms into effective action across fragmented national systems.

This is where the real significance of the emerging literature lies. Its value is not in generating new prescriptions, but in reshaping the very way African integration is understood. Regional integration in Africa is increasingly less a project of market expansion than a practical system for governing shared risks, managing deep economic interdependence, and building resilience in a world defined by continuous shocks and uncertainty.