Integration Begins, Not Ends, with Proximity: Writing The Next Chapter of African Integration

Africa’s integration story has historically been written through geography. Countries first integrated with those closest to them, building regional economic communities (RECs) around shared borders, established trade routes and common interests. The EAC, ECOWAS, SADC and COMESA have created important institutional and economic spaces, and their role remains indispensable. Proximity is, after all, where most integration initiative begin: neighbours trade first with neighbours, infrastructure develops along the shortest routes, and political cooperation is easier to build where economic relationships already exist. But proximity is a beginning, not an endpoint. The difficulty is that Africa’s regional blocs have not yet been sufficiently integrated with one another. The continent has progressively built economic neighbourhoods, but it has struggled to connect those neighbourhoods into a functioning continental system.

According to Afreximbank, intra-African trade accounted for only 15.3% of Africa's total trade in 2024. Moreover, this trade remains unevenly distributed: Southern Africa accounted for 42.1% of intra-African trade flows, followed by West Africa with 23.3%, East Africa with 14.5%, North Africa with 12.6% and Central Africa with just 7.5%. These figures should be interpreted with some caution, particularly given the significant and uneven role of informal cross-border trade across regional blocs. Yet they reveal a deeper structural reality: Africa is not yet a single, interconnected economic space, but a constellation of regional trading blocs whose links with one another remain comparatively weak. The continent has made greater progress integrating within some regional neighbourhoods than connecting those neighbourhoods to one another. Africa has built regional islands of integration. It has yet to build enough bridges between them.

This is the deeper challenge confronting the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA). For the first time, Africa has a continental framework capable of connecting its diverse regional economic sub-systems within a common architecture. But a framework, it does not matter how ambitious it is, does not by itself create a functioning continental economic system. Trade agreements open borders; networks make them usable. A continental market may exist in law long before it becomes a reality in the daily economic lives of businesses and producers.

For the AfCFTA to become more than an agreement on paper, Africa must build the economic geography beneath it. Continental integration cannot be reduced to removing barriers between countries; it must also be about connecting economic systems that have so far developed largely in isolation from one another. This means linking corridors that stop at regional boundaries, energy networks that fall short of neighbouring markets, payment systems confined within national or regional spaces, digital infrastructures that cannot yet communicate seamlessly, and production networks that rarely extend across the continent's regional blocs. Africa's next integration challenge is therefore not simply to remove the obstacles between its economies, but to build the connections that reduce the economic distance between them, enabling previously separate systems to function as interconnected parts of a larger continental economic system.

This is why countries like the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) occupy an essential place in the African integration dynamics. Geographically, the DRC is at the heart of Africa. It borders nine countries and sits at the intersection of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. Few countries are better positioned to connect the continent’s major regional economic spaces like DRC. Yet economically and infrastructurally, the DRC remains remarkably disconnected from the systems around it. Its roads and railways are inadequate, but the problem extends far beyond transport. Its energy networks remain insufficiently connected and its digital and financial infrastructure unable to translate its geographical position into economic centrality. The paradox is profound: the country at the geographical centre of Africa is not yet at the centre of Africa’s economic networks.

This makes the DRC's challenge much more than a national development problem. It is a continental integration problem. If Africa wants to connect its regional markets, it cannot leave an infrastructural and economic gap at the centre of its geography. The DRC is therefore not simply one more infrastructure challenge among many. It is a test of whether Africa can transform geographical centrality into economic centrality.

Yet connectivity cannot be built by infrastructure alone. The DRC’s physical and digital disconnection is also shaped by prolonged conflict, institutional fragility and governance challenges, particularly in the east part of its territory. Corridors do not function simply because roads are built; they require security, predictable institutions, effective border management and sufficient confidence for businesses to invest and operate across them. Economic connectivity is therefore partly an infrastructure problem, but also a political and institutional one. Without stability and governance, even the best-designed corridor can become underused lines on a map.

The opportunity, nevertheless, is extraordinary. The DRC possesses some of the world's most important deposits of critical minerals, vast agricultural potential and enormous hydropower resources. Its position could allow it to connect economic systems stretching from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes and from Central Africa towards Eastern and Southern Africa. But resources do not create networks. Geography does not create connectivity. Potential does not create circulation. Networks do.

This is why the DRC should be viewed not merely as a country in need of infrastructure, but as the missing link at the centre of Africa’s economic map. A corridor connecting the DRC to neighbouring economies is a regional asset. A network connecting Central Africa to Eastern and Southern Africa is continental infrastructure.

The same logic applies to energy. A power plant serving a local market is essential development infrastructure. An interconnected energy system capable of moving electricity across borders can become the foundation of regional industrialisation. The DRC's hydropower potential illustrates the point. Africa’s challenge is not simply to generate more electricity, but to connect energy potential to productive demand. Energy becomes transformative when it can circulate.

But the pathways to connectivity are not all the same. Some require decades of capital investment and political coordination: major hydropower projects such as Inga, cross-border transmission networks, railways and strategic transport corridors. Others can be advanced more quickly through institutional interoperability and relatively modest investment. Cross-border digital payment systems such as PAPSS, for example, can reduce transaction friction without waiting for a common currency to be adopted. Harmonised customs procedures, interoperable digital systems, data exchange and more efficient border management can generate connectivity gains far sooner than large physical infrastructure projects.

The strategic challenge is therefore to build both the skeleton and the nervous system of continental integration: long-term physical infrastructure that moves people, goods and energy, alongside faster-moving digital, financial and institutional systems that allow transactions and information to circulate with much less friction.

This points to a broader rethinking of what integration means. Africa already possesses scale. Its 54 countries, enormous population, vast resource base and diverse markets give it an economic mass that few regions can match. What it lacks is a continental circulatory framework.

And a circulatory framework is about far more than building roads and railways. Infrastructure is only the visible skeleton of an integrated economy. What Africa needs is something closer to a circulatory system: the veins, organs and connective tissues through which the factors of production (goods, services, people and capital) can move across borders, interact with one another and generate value in different parts of the continent.

Roads and railways are the veins, but they cannot function in isolation. Energy grids are the arteries that power production. Digital payment platforms are the financial capillaries through which transactions can flow. Manufacturing clusters and industrial networks are the productive organs in which value is created and transformed. Regional value chains are the pathways through which inputs, knowledge, technology and capital move from one economy to another, acquiring greater value as they circulate. Ports, logistics corridors and border systems are the gateways through which the entire system exchanges with the outside world. Seen in this way, integration is not simply about making it easier for a product to cross a border. It is about creating the conditions in which economic activity itself can circulate across borders.

The ultimate objective should therefore not simply to increase the volume of intra-African trade, as many analysts propose. It is to build a continental economic system in which value can move, interact, transform and accumulate across borders. When a mineral extracted in one country can be processed in another, financed in a third, powered by energy generated in a fourth and incorporated into a regional manufacturing chain spanning several others, integration has moved beyond trade. It has become a continental architecture of production.

This is where Africa's real opportunity lies. The continent does not need to manufacture scale that it already possesses. It needs to build the economic circulatory system that allows that scale to become productive. The AfCFTA can provide the institutional framework, but the networks beneath it (energy, logistics, digital, financial, industrial and productive) will determine whether Africa's continental market exists only on paper or becomes an economic reality.

The AfCFTA is therefore essential, but its role should not be understood as replacing Africa's regional economic communities. Nor should continental integration be imagined as a simple hierarchy in which the continental level supersedes the regional one. A more productive model may be a network of networks: RECs providing the foundations of proximity-based integration, while the AfCFTA provides a continental coordination layer that enables these regional systems to become increasingly interoperable. In this model, proximity remains important, but it no longer defines the limits of integration.

The real measure of African integration would then be not simply how intensely countries trade with their immediate neighbours, but how effectively the continent connects economic systems that are geographically and institutionally distant. Integration would be measured by the strength of the bridges between regions, not only by the density of activity within them. And this brings us back to the DRC.

The DRC is often described as a country with enormous untapped potential. But perhaps that description misses the larger point. Its greatest untapped resource may not be a mineral deposit or a hydropower site. It may be its geographical position. A connected DRC could become a bridge between regional economic systems that currently function too much like separate worlds. It could help turn Central Africa from a relatively isolated economic space into a connecting space, allowing energy to flow, minerals to be transformed, goods to circulate and production networks to extend across borders. In other words, the DRC could help Africa solve a problem that no trade agreement can solve on its own: how to make the continent's regional economies interact as parts of one system. This is why connecting the DRC is not only about connecting the DRC. It is about connecting Africa to itself.

Africa’s integration project has spent decades building neighbourhoods. The next phase must connect them: through corridors that cross regional boundaries, energy systems that link productive centres, digital platforms that reduce transaction costs, financial systems that allow capital to circulate, and value chains through which economic activity can accumulate across borders. Africa already possesses the scale, resources, population, regional institutions and, with the AfCFTA, a continental framework. What it still lacks the connective and circulatory system that allows these assets to function as parts of a single economic organism.

The DRC sits at the centre of this paradox. If it remains disconnected, Africa’s regional economies will continue to behave like neighbouring islands, trading with one another but rarely functioning as parts of one economic system. But if the DRC becomes connected (physically, energetically, digitally, financially and productively), the consequences could extend far beyond its borders. The geographical centre of Africa could become an economic gravitational field, drawing together corridors, capital and production while radiating connectivity across regional boundaries and helping transform separate economic systems into a truly continental network.

This is the deeper test of the AfCFTA: not whether Africa can declare itself one market, but whether it can make its economic systems function as one. Africa's integration began with proximity. Its next chapter must be written in connectivity. Perhaps, ultimately, the measure of continental integration will be found not at Africa's borders, but at its centre: whether the country at the geographical heart of the continent can finally become an economic engine through which its regions connect, circulate and grow together.