Integrating Africa: From Threads to Hubs

This publication stands out as far more than a conventional report on regional integration. Integrating Africa: From Threads to Hubs has the potential to become a reference framework for the next generation of African trade and industrial policy. What makes this report particularly compelling is its alignment with the deeper ambitions of the African Continental Free Trade Area. It moves beyond traditional trade liberalisation narratives by integrating value chain thinking into regional policy and reframing integration as a tool for job creation, industrialisation, and structural transformation.

A central contribution of the report lies in its candid diagnosis of existing trade agreements across the continent. It highlights that, despite their proliferation (including the AfCFTA) many remain underutilised and weakly implemented. The report rightly shifts the focus from legal frameworks to operational enforcement, regulatory alignment, and genuine private sector uptake. In doing so, it argues that tariffs and non-tariff barriers are no longer the primary constraint to intra-African trade. Regulatory fragmentation, weak logistics, and inadequate infrastructure continue to drive up trade costs, effectively rendering geographically proximate economies “economically distant”.

Most importantly, the report advances a new conceptual and operational framework for African integration. It argues that the continent must move away from fragmented and shallow trade linkages (described as “threads”), towards dense, coordinated production systems, or “hubs”. Trade integration is not about moving goods across borders: it’s about organising production across borders. A key pathway to achieving this is the development of regional value chains that leverage production complementarities among African countries.

This is not merely a rhetorical shift, but a powerful diagnostic lens capable of reshaping how policymakers, development partners, and researchers approach Africa’s economic transformation.

At its core, the report contends that Africa’s integration challenge is not one of ambition, but of structure. There are too many strategies with insufficient coordination, too many agreements with limited implementation, and too strong a focus on borders at the expense of production systems. Integration must therefore be reimagined as an industrial and spatial transformation project, rather than a narrow trade policy agenda.

What ultimately distinguishes this report is its clear departure from the traditional, and often repetitive, discourse on African integration. Its most original contribution is conceptual: it challenges the long-standing assumption that reducing trade barriers (both tariff and non-tariff ones), alone, will generate integration. Instead, it argues convincingly that production precedes trade, not the other way around: a perspective that aligns closely with what we always argued.

In this sense, Integrating Africa: From Threads to Hubs does not simply propose new policy solutions. It redefines the problem itself, offering a more realistic and transformative framework for understanding and advancing regional integration in Africa.

Thanks to the World Bank to have given us the opportunity to contribute to this important report and for mentioning our CEO in the acknowledgements.