Beyond Implementation: Rethinking African Integration as a System of Interoperable Layers

Most debates surrounding the AfCFTA tend to revolve around the gap between ambitious legal frameworks and uneven implementation. The central question is often framed in these terms: if the architecture is in place and political commitments exist, why does progress remain fragmented and inconsistent? Yet this framing may itself be incomplete. This article forms part of a broader effort to examine the AfCFTA and its relationship with subordinate frameworks through a different analytical lens. In a previous analysis, we argued that the AfCFTA should not be understood merely as a trade agreement, but as a coordination architecture for fragmented integration: an overarching framework intended to generate coherence across pre-existing, overlapping, and often disjointed trade regimes without pushing these systems towards an artificially constructed uniformity. This article moves one step further by exploring how interactions between those layers function in practice, and which interfaces (or “operational touchpoints”) make coordination possible between continental, regional, subregional, and national systems. The point is simple: integration is not only a matter of drafting better rules or implementing them more effectively. It is also a matter of understanding how the system itself operates. A basic principle of systems thinking applies here: one cannot improve the performance of individual components without first understanding the dynamics of the whole. African integration has often been imagined as a ladder, with each supranational layer gradually replacing the one below it. But is this assumption necessarily applicable in Africa? What if continental, regional, subregional, and national frameworks are not designed to replace one another, but to coexist? Because integration does not necessarily mean building a single system. It may also mean to make multiple systems work together in an harmonious way.