Conventional top-down integration models are insufficient for Africa: The article challenges the assumption that agreements like the AfCFTA will automatically drive integration, arguing that political/institutional integration has outpaced real productive and industrial integration.

A project-centred, bottom-up approach is needed: True integration emerges from cross-border productive linkages, regional value chains, joint industrial projects, and economic corridors — not just trade agreements. Factories and supply chains create interdependence; institutions should support and scale them.

The AfCFTA should act as a platform, not the sole engine: It should connect and amplify successful regional initiatives rather than trying to drive continental integration from the top down. Success requires better alignment of industrial policy, infrastructure, financing, and interoperability across RECs.

For decades, regional integration has been guided by a dominant linear logic. Governments negotiate agreements, establish supranational institutions, harmonize regulations, reduce tariffs, and economic integration will automatically follow. This hierarchical, top-down logic has shaped integration efforts around the world, from customs unions to common markets. It also underpins much of the thinking surrounding the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), widely celebrated as the most ambitious trade agreement ever undertaken on the continent. But what if this sequence does not reflect how integration actually happens in Africa?

In a recent paper, African Integration Reimagined: From Continental-Level Aspirations to Regional-Level Realities, my co-author Eric Tevoedjre and I argue that Africa’s integration challenge is fundamentally different from that of other regions. Conventional integration theory assumes that regional integration advances through successive layers of governance, with each institutional level encompassing and coordinating the one below it. Over the past three decades, Africa has largely followed this trajectory, progressively expanding its governance architecture and culminating in the AfCFTA, which today brings together almost the entire continent under a common trade framework. Yet this institutional layering has not been matched by an equivalent layering of productive systems. The missing ingredient is the lack of a dense web of cross-border productive linkages capable of transforming political commitments into genuine economic interdependence.

This distinction is more important than it may initially appear. Political integration and productive integration are often treated as if they are interchangeable, but in reality they are not. A free trade agreement can remove tariffs and create mechanisms for dispute settlement, but it cannot oblige firms to produce together, convince manufacturers to source components from neighbouring countries or create regional supply chains where none exist. Those processes emerge from investment decisions, industrial complementarities and commercial opportunities rather than from legal texts alone.

The AfCFTA represents an extraordinary political achievement, but political integration should not be confused with industrial integration. The first provides the architecture of integration. The second lays down the economic foundations on which that architecture can stand. Factories create integration. Supply chains create integration. Joint industrial projects create integration. Agreements simply make these processes easier. This observation invites a different way of thinking about African integration. 

The policy debate has entered a new phase. The question is no longer whether the AfCFTA should be implemented, but how its implementation can be accelerated. Yet this debate also reveals a deeper assumption that has come to shape the dominant narrative around African integration: that the AfCFTA can serve as the key engine capable of pulling the entire continent towards economic integration. This expectation places an extraordinary burden on a continental agreement designed to connect fifty-four economies with vastly different productive structures, levels of industrialisation and institutional capacities. Africa is simply too large, too diverse and too economically heterogeneous for integration to be powered by one engine alone. A continental market cannot be built by a single mechanism operating from the centre;........

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