By Amine IDRISS ADOUM, Director of Economy, Infrastructure, Industrialisation, Trade and Regional Integration, AUDA-NEPAD
Make Africa Borderless Now! must echo through AU Summits, Regional Economic Community (REC) ministerials, central bank committees, capital-market regulators’ meetings, investor forums, and every global platform where our continent’s future is debated—from Davos to the G20 to the UN General Assembly. Because what holds us back is not a shortage of priorities. It is a broken operating system: we still finance Africa like a fragmented consumer market, not like an integrated continent of producers.
For years, we have repeated the phrase “financing gap” as if it were a diagnosis. It is often a distraction. When we aggregate our pensions, insurance assets, sovereign wealth funds, banking pools and other public savings vehicles, we are already sitting on well over 2 trillion USD in domestic capital—before we even count diaspora resources or the vast savings and investment cycles in the informal economy. So the real question is not “where is the money?” The real question is: why can’t our money find our factories?
The answer is uncomfortable—but liberating: our money is not missing; it is trapped. It is parked in short-term government securities and deposits not because our asset managers lack patriotism, but because our markets lack depth. We have underbuilt the mechanisms that convert savings into investment: long-tenor instruments, credible local-currency yield curves, liquid bond markets, bankable project pipelines, credit enhancement, predictable settlement systems, and crucially—a regional investment space where capital can diversify and scale. In other words, we are not capital-poor; we are market-shallow and intermediation-poor. We have the fuel, but we have not built a powerful enough engine—and we have not connected it across borders.
That is why Africa’s most urgent reform agenda is not another declaration. It is financial depth. We need capital markets that can price risk properly, mobilise long-term savings, and finance industry. We need central banks and regulators to move from “guardians of stability” to “architects of depth”: modernise payment and settlement rails, build benchmark yield curves, enable long-tenor local-currency instruments, strengthen collateral and insolvency frameworks, and harmonise rules across regions so investors can scale beyond national silos. Without these reforms, our institutional capital will continue to behave rationally and unproductively—because there will be no safe, investable route into productive assets. And without cross-border interoperability, domestic financing will remain too small, too expensive, and too short-term to industrialise a continent.
Borderless Africa is not poetry
This is also why we must stop treating “borderless Africa” as poetry. Borderless Africa is the financing strategy. Capital cannot power industrial corridors if it is fenced in by regulatory islands. AfCFTA will not deliver if it remains a legal framework without an integrated investment space. Trade must become predictable so cashflows become bankable; payments must become interoperable so commerce becomes scalable; and markets must become connected so savings can move into production. A continent of makers cannot be built on 50-plus disconnected financial systems.
Here is the good news: the African development and financing community is already shifting from talk to mechanisms. The African Union Development Agency-New Partnership for Africa’s Development (AUDA-NEPAD), Afreximbank, African Development Bank (AfDB), regional development banks, Africa50, Africa Finance Corporation (AFC), national development banks and other African Development Finance Institutions (DFIs)—working through cooperation platforms such as the Alliance of African Multilateral Financial Institutions (AAMFI, also known as the “Africa Club”) —are building the enabling architecture that turns priorities into investable assets.
The Luanda Financing Summit offered a clear signal: we can move from speeches about “gaps” to building balance-sheet solutions. Through AAMFI, we launched a dedicated infrastructure financing facility anchored by an initial 1.5 billion USD commitment—an African leverage platform designed to de-risk and crowd in much larger pools of domestic institutional capital. But AAMFI is not the story by itself; it is the coordination layer. The scale comes when our DFIs act as a system: aligning pipelines, co-financing, guarantees, project preparation and risk tools to create assets that African pension funds and insurers can buy—at the right tenor, in the right currency, with risk structured professionally.
Finance, however, needs destinations. That is why our continental platforms matter. The Programme for Infrastructure Development in Africa – Priority Action Plan 2 (PIDA-PAP2) is not “a list of roads”—it is the physical internet of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA): corridors, ports, rail, digital backbones, and border efficiency that make trade real. The Continental Power Systems Master Plan is the other half: we cannot industrialise in the dark. A borderless energy market—where power can be generated where it is cheapest and traded where it is needed—is how we lower production costs and make African manufacturing competitive. And if infrastructure is the hardware, PAIDA is the software: a deliberate push to build regional value chains, industrial clusters and processing capacity so we stop exporting jobs and importing finished goods.
Tariffs and Compliance
But there is a silent killer that keeps undermining our market-access promises: quality infrastructure. We often say we did not fully exploit the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) because we lacked competitiveness. The deeper truth is technical: we lacked the standards, labs, accreditation, certification, metrology and market surveillance to meet demanding requirements consistently and at scale. Tariffs were never the only barrier; compliance was. If we do not invest in quality infrastructure and harmonise standards across regions, AfCFTA will also underdeliver—because non-tariff barriers will replace tariffs as the real wall. A maker continent is built on trust, and trust is built on standards.
We should also confront the largest balance sheet we keep ignoring: the informal economy. We treat it as a governance problem when it is also a capital-formation opportunity. Millions of Africans save, trade, lend and reinvest daily outside formal channels. The goal is not to harass them into paperwork; it is to build pathways—digital payments, identity, credit histories, simple investment vehicles, interoperable settlement—that make cashflows legible and investable. Deep capital markets do not only mobilise pensions and insurers; they can also unlock informal savings and enterprise growth by connecting everyday commerce to formal finance.
So here is the proposition we should carry from APD 2026 to every AU Summit and every global forum: we will not industrialise by chasing external money while our own capital stays idle. We will industrialise when we complete the reforms that create financial depth and when we finish building a borderless financial machine that connects our savings to productive assets. That machine is not abstract: it is being built by the African development and financing community—AUDA-NEPAD, Afreximbank, AfDB, regional development banks and other African DFIs—coordinating through AAMFI and allied platforms; powered by continental pipelines such as PIDA-PAP2 and the Continental Power Systems Master Plan; guided by PAIDA in a truly borderless AfCFTA market; and anchored by a unified quality infrastructure ecosystem that makes “Made in Africa” competitive and tradable.
We already have entrepreneurs. We already have demand. We certainly have capital. What we need urgently is the discipline to build depth, integrate markets, and complete the architecture that turns our money into factories. That is how we stop being described as a consumer continent and finally become what we already claim to be: a continent of makers.