Africa Without Borders? Trade, Payments and Mobility

Transcript

• [00:00] Ana: Hi, and welcome to Emerging Markets Today. My name is Ana Paula Picasso, and this episode is about Africa on the Move, a recent report from the Mo Ibrahim Foundation, an organization focused on African governance and leadership. We’ll talk about mobility, infrastructure and connectivity across the African continent. Joining me is Ben Crumpton, Senior Researcher at the Mo Ibrahim Foundation. Hi, Ben. Welcome to the podcast.
• [00:34] Ben: Hi, Ana. Thank you very much for having me.
• [00:37] Ana: The reason I wanted you to come on the podcast was because of ChatGPT, believe it or not.
• [00:46] Ben: It’s uniting us all now!
• [00:48] Ana: I used to Google myself, and now I ChatGPT myself. I was searching for Emerging Markets Today because sometimes I get backlinks. I saw that you had cited one of our articles about the cost of flights within Africa, and that led me to your report, Africa on the Move, which was very interesting. How did the idea for the report come about?
• [01:18] Ben: It’s great that we were brought together through AI. A sign of the times! The Mo Ibrahim Foundation has worked on migration and mobility issues before. We wanted to update our figures and our perspective in 2026, as it’s such a current and relevant issue. The report began with a couple of key questions. One concerned the African Continental Free Trade Area, the African Union’s flagship initiative. We wanted to examine its implementation: how is it progressing, what are the barriers, and what’s working or not working? The framing question was: What does a free trade agreement mean if people, goods and money still struggle to move across borders in Africa? The second question concerned migration itself. The foundation aims to present the best and most up-to-date data on important African issues as objectively as possible, to correct or clarify prevailing narratives. Looking at the migration data, one interesting finding is that about 55% of African citizens who leave their country of birth remain within Africa. If you look only at sub-Saharan Africa, the figure is close to 75%. So a great deal of African migration takes place within the continent. That underlines the importance of the AfCFTA and of how people move between African countries.
• [03:34] Ana: Just to clarify for people who aren’t familiar with it, because I wasn’t too familiar either: you mentioned the AfCFTA, the African Continental Free Trade Area. What is it? In Latin America we have Mercosur, and here in Europe we have the EU. How does the AfCFTA compare with those arrangements?
• [04:05] Ben: It has a lot of similarities. It’s the flagship initiative of the African Union and has several elements. Free trade and mobility are key features. At the moment, about 50 of the African Union’s 55 member states have ratified it. That’s near-universal ratification, which is good, but ratification isn’t the same as full implementation. Countries are working on removing and harmonizing tariffs, which gets a lot of attention, but also on free movement, visa arrangements and cross-border recognition of qualifications so that people can move between countries for work. In those respects it resembles aspects of the EU, Mercosur and other regional agreements. There’s been a lot of progress, political will and ratification. What ultimately matters to us is how effectively it’s implemented across the continent and what obstacles remain.
• [05:46] Ana: Going back to mobility and infrastructure, one of the points I took from the report was that Africa doesn’t simply need more infrastructure. Are we talking about hard infrastructure, like roads and railways, or also soft infrastructure, such as visas, payments and remittances? How would you classify those needs?
• [06:31] Ben: Both hard and soft infrastructure need improvement. Starting with hard infrastructure, roads, rail and aviation are all improving across the continent. There’s significant domestic and international interest and investment in major infrastructure projects, including ports, roads and railways. That’s a real area of progress, but there’s still a lot to do. Take roads, for example. They’re the lifeblood of movement around the continent, carrying about 90% of freight traffic. Yet road networks are often discontinuous or not maintained as well as they could be. Rail is underused. Many African railway systems were built around the colonial model of moving raw commodities from pit to port. Those routes don’t necessarily serve the continent’s current needs. They may connect mines to ports without connecting major cities. Aviation is another area of progress. There are impressive regional and domestic success stories, such as Ethiopian Airlines. But if you dig into the data, a lot of air traffic still takes people out of the continent rather than connecting destinations within Africa.
• [08:50] Ana: That’s one of the things we discussed in the article. Sometimes you have to fly to the Middle East or Europe and then back into Africa.
• [09:06] Ben: Exactly. There aren’t enough major transport hubs across the continent. Many routes go through the same cities, like Addis Ababa or Nairobi. Say someone wants to travel from Kinshasa to Marrakesh. They may not be able to fly directly and instead have to connect through Istanbul, the Gulf or Europe. That’s expensive and time-consuming.
• [09:47] Ana: Coming from Brazil, I think about South America. If I want to fly from São Paulo to Santiago, Chile, there are connections. South America isn’t exactly comparable, but maybe it already has more developed flight hubs, while Africa is still getting there.
• [10:30] Ben: I think it’s a combination of physical infrastructure and nurturing demand so that airlines can fill those seats. But yes, the comparison is useful.
• [10:45] Ana: Now I’d like to move to the part I’m most interested in: soft mobility, the movement of people and money. I’ve written about remittances within African countries, not just between Africa and Europe or the US. Could you give us an overview of intra-African payments and remittances, and the challenges there?
• [11:22] Ben: Remittances are growing and are an important source of revenue, particularly for some countries. But the foundation is also interested in payments more broadly, including payments related to trade, not just remittances. One initiative we’d like to see adopted more widely is the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System, or PAPSS.
• [12:10] Ana: PAPSS. Another acronym! What is it, briefly, for listeners?
• [12:15] Ben: It’s a slightly easier acronym to remember than AfCFTA. Ethiopia has joined in the last few days, which is interesting.
• [12:35] Ben: Essentially, PAPSS is a system designed to enable transactions using African countries’ local currencies directly, without first converting through an intermediary currency, most often the US dollar. That can lower conversion costs and remove an intermediary step. Countries need to agree to participate in the mechanism. The aim is to improve cross-border payments, reduce dependence on intermediary currencies and demonstrate how digital transactions can work more effectively. There are about 20 central banks participating, and more countries are joining. Building that momentum should be positive.
• [13:45] Ana: Has it made a meaningful difference so far, or is it too early to tell?
• [13:53] Ben: It’s somewhere in the middle. It’s still gathering pace, and progress increasingly depends on the participation of major economies. Ethiopia has joined, and Nigeria is part of it. As with similar initiatives in other regions, the real benefits come when participation reaches critical mass. It’s similar with protocols on the free movement of people. Where ratification is limited, their impact is limited too. As more countries participate, these initiatives become stronger.
• [14:45] Ana: This also connects to de-dollarization. There’s a lot of discussion around BRICS countries trying to create a currency or use the Chinese yuan more widely. There’s a broader trend of emerging markets trying to reduce their dependence on the US dollar. Why do you think that is?
• [15:19] Ben: There are many motivations behind de-dollarization. From the foundation’s perspective, one potential benefit is encouraging states to invest surplus revenue domestically instead of directing it into traditionally safer assets abroad, such as US Treasury bonds. Domestic resource mobilization is important to the foundation. As de-dollarization becomes a more mainstream policy goal among BRICS countries and other emerging markets, it can encourage governments to think more carefully about where their resources could be deployed at home.
• [16:19] Ana: Looking ahead five to ten years, based on the report and your research, what developments in connectivity do you think are most likely?
• [16:46] Ben: My key takeaway is that the overall trajectory is positive. You can’t build a single market if the people who make it work can’t move around it. And there are signs that countries recognize this direction of travel. Ethiopia joining PAPSS is one example. I hope we continue to see progress on soft mobility and more permissive travel within Africa. At the moment, I think around 30% of travel between African countries is visa-free. Countries like Rwanda, Benin, The Gambia and Togo have relatively permissive visa-entry policies for African citizens. I’d expect that to improve. Infrastructure is another area. The trend is towards building regional value chains and connecting regional markets. As Africa’s cities grow, I think they will increasingly be connected by better transport infrastructure. That should improve mobility and help address some of the outdated network patterns we talked about earlier. I also expect cross-border payments to become easier. Countries will increasingly see the benefits of trading goods and services with their neighbours, rather than focusing only on traditional partners outside Africa. We can already see progress within regional economic communities in southern and western Africa. They’re smaller-scale examples of what can work, with some caveats. As those communities connect more effectively with one another, that should improve the movement of people, goods and services. But it still depends on political will and reciprocity between governments. States have legitimate political concerns about opening borders, and citizens need to feel confident that changes will benefit their economies and daily lives. Overall, though, this is the direction in which things appear to be heading.
• [20:27] Ana: That’s an encouraging outlook. I’ll link the Africa on the Move report in the show notes. For listeners who want to learn more about Africa and the foundation’s research, what other reports would you recommend?
• [20:50] Ben: Please visit our website and research page. We publish reports on a range of topics, including climate and security. The most relevant place to start is our 2025 Forum Report, Financing the Africa We Want. It looks at domestic resource mobilization, the flows of money into and out of the continent, what happens to those resources and where further development is needed. Another publication to look out for is the 2026 Ibrahim Index of African Governance, which the foundation is launching at the end of October. It offers a dataset tracking governance progress across 54 African countries, four categories and thousands of data points.
• [22:00] Ana: I think this episode will be published around the time the index comes out, so I’ll link it in the show notes. Thank you very much, Ben. Is there anything else you’d like to add, or any way listeners can contact you?
• [22:21] Ben: Feel free to reach out to me if you include my contact details. I’m always happy to answer questions and chat. And do keep an eye out for the new index. Thank you for having me. I’ve really appreciated the opportunity to talk through the report.
• [22:41] Ana: Maybe we’ll do a second episode about the index.
• [22:44] Ben: That would be lovely. Absolutely.
• [22:47] Ana: Thank you, Ben, and thank you to everybody listening. I learned a lot about Africa today. Don’t forget to like and subscribe. You can watch us on video on Spotify and Substack, or just listen. And if you’re not subscribed on Substack, you’ll find the link in the description so you can get more emerging markets news in your inbox. Thank you, and see you next time. Bye!