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.
