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Africa must move beyond thinking in terms of national borders and focus on building integrated trade and infrastructure corridors if it hopes to compete on the global stage, Haytham El Maayergi, Executive Vice President for Global Trade Bank at Afreximbank, said at the World Economic Forum in Davos.
El Maayergi warned that Africa’s 1.3 billion-strong population, often cited as a competitive advantage, is not enough if the continent continues to act in silos.
He said, “Let’s stop thinking borders. Let’s think corridors. Let’s not think that we are a 1.3 billion emerging market. We’re competing with 1.3 billion Chinese, 1.3 billion Indians. The only difference between the three of us is that two of us have blueprints, one blueprint written by one central point, that they’re all singing the same song within this blueprint, while we have different countries.”
He added, “It’s like, what are the 14 most important roads that we all together need to build to be able to trade with each other without going to Europe and back? What are the three points that we need the biggest ports in Africa? Which airport? Should we use waterways in some areas? So we need to come up around one plan that we all sing and build it together so that our dream of connecting, because let’s not forget, during colonisation, all of our roads were mine to port out. We were not designed into mine to factory or mine to my neighbor. And we need a blueprint to get us out of this, that is financially backed by everything.”
He also stressed the importance of structured, multi-country projects that encourage value addition within Africa. Linking raw material suppliers, manufacturers, and consumers across borders—while integrating initiatives like the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS)—could create sustainable investment ecosystems rather than isolated, one-off projects.
He said, “If we do this and get people like Afreximbank, who anchors the investment and put balance sheet to encourage everybody else to come along and start to look at a fund, there’s nothing stopping us from getting the diaspora interested also to put in and chip in for this amazing purpose of pulling Africa together in a sense. So I think the whole idea is we cannot compete alone. We have to play together, because our competition are coherent. And this is very obvious.”
Melissa Enoch
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