This article, originally published by the Africa Transport Policy Program, also known as SSATP, lays bare why road transport must be central to Africa’s single market.
The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) aims to create “a single market for goods and services, facilitated by the movement of persons, in order to deepen the economic integration of the African continent.” With such ambition, transport and trade facilitation should feature prominently as enablers of this continental vision.
Yet in practice, road transport – the dominant mode carrying more than 80% of Africa’s goods – barely features in the AfCFTA treaty. The text mentions air and maritime transport, but road transport is absent. Trade facilitation appears in the Protocol on Trade in Goods (particularly its Annex 4), but the Protocol on Trade in Services adds little more detail on transport than the treaty itself.
This omission leaves the Regional Economic Communities (RECs) with the responsibility of defining the frameworks that govern transport and logistics services. But regional rules are uneven, fragmented and often incomplete. The challenge lies in not only addressing existing gaps but also in deciding what kind of harmonisation Africa should pursue.
Framing the road transport gap
Recent analytical work helps frame this debate. A study by SSATP on corridor management institutions examined the regional instruments regulating transport in the numerous RECs, while the 2025 edition of the IRU-World Bank report with inputs from SSATP provides a structure for analysing the regional instruments and existing gaps.
The guiding principles develop a regulatory framework for road transport and distinguish between two critical but often conflated concepts:
- Access to the profession (or industry): The conditions to be met by an operator to be recognised as a road transport operator, including legal status, financial capacity, professional competence, and driver qualifications.
- Access to the market: The conditions under which an operator can provide transport services in a particular market – whether domestic, bilateral, regional, or for specific commodities.
These concepts are distinct. Meeting the criteria to become a professional carrier does not automatically grant the right to operate in every market. The widespread cabotage rule illustrates this: many African countries reserve domestic transport for national operators, regardless of whether foreign carriers are recognised as professionals in their home markets.
At present, regional instruments regulating access to the profession are minimal. Recognition of operators tends to be implicit: if a company is licensed in one country, it is assumed – rather than formally acknowledged – that it is legitimate in another. By contrast, there are numerous regional rules governing market access, including quotas, permits and authorisation mechanisms.
This imbalance between market access and professionalisation shapes how transport services operate across Africa and exposes gaps that undermine integration.
What defines a professional operator?
In principle, access to the profession should be based on clear, objective standards. Operators should be established as commercial undertakings, demonstrate financial capacity, employ qualified managers of good repute, and hire drivers with licences and specialised training.
In Africa, however, no regional instruments define such criteria in a systematic way. Some regulations touch on related areas – vehicle standards, axle load limits, technical inspections, driver licensing – but these are partial and inconsistent. For example:
- Vehicle standards (dimensions, profiles, weights) vary across regions, with ECOWAS/WAEMU and the Tripartite (COMESA, EAC, and SADC) adopting different limits.
- Vehicle inspections often cover safety features but rarely emissions, which are hard to regulate given fuel quality differences across countries.
- Driver licensing is typically recognised within a REC, but professional driver certification (beyond basic licensing) is rarely harmonised.
As a result, the very definition of a professional road transport operator remains vague, leaving space for informal practices and regulatory inconsistencies.
Restrictive rules on market access
If professionalisation is under-regulated, market access is heavily controlled. Regional instruments define how transport companies operate internationally, often through restrictive mechanisms.
In West and Central Africa, quota systems under the Interstate Road Transit (TIE) Convention allocate freight between countries: half-and-half for bilateral trade, and two-thirds/one-third for landlocked–coastal maritime trade.
Shippers’ councils in West Africa and freight bureaus in Central Africa monitor compliance, though enforcement is weak. In practice, informal mechanisms such as the tour de rôle – a system for load allocation managed by transport unions, but often distorted by queue jumping, bribes, and political interference – and interventions by intermediaries often play a decisive role in how market access operates.
By contrast, Eastern and Southern Africa have taken a different approach. The Tripartite was established in 2005 to harmonise transport rules across overlapping RECs. After years of negotiation, the Vehicle Load Management Agreement and the Multilateral Cross-Border Road Transport Agreement (MCBRTA) were adopted in 2023.
MCBRTA marks a major shift from the previous bilateral system, where market access was regulated through limited numbers of permits with variable validity. Instead, it introduces a quality-based system, granting access to carriers that meet defined standards. While this represents progress, full implementation across the three RECs will take time, and access-to-profession rules remain largely unaddressed.
Lessons from regional experience
These contrasting regional approaches show how difficult harmonisation is – even in areas with overlapping memberships and strong trading ties. In Eastern and Southern Africa, convergence has taken nearly two decades, despite relatively favourable conditions: a pre-existing regional market, overlapping REC memberships, and competitive pressures that encouraged de facto alignment.
By comparison, at the continental level, integration across Africa’s two main blocs – West/Central and Eastern/Southern Africa – has barely begun. The Congo River basin, poor road infrastructure, and complex border procedures continue to fragment markets. Over long distances, maritime transport often remains more competitive than road. This reality underscores the stakes for AfCFTA. Without progress on transport regulation, the single market risks remaining a paper ambition.
The questions ahead
The question for the future is in which direction harmonisation efforts should go: towards deeper harmonisation on a more comprehensive set of regulations for each of the two main transport and logistics markets only? Towards completing the scope of harmonisation to include standards for access to the profession? Or towards convergence at the continental level?
One possible way forward would be to focus on the missing pieces, starting with clear continental standards for access to the industry. Such standards would help level the playing field across operators from different countries, while raising the overall quality and reliability of road transport and logistics services across Africa.
There are no simple answers. But avoiding the discussion is not an option.
SSATP’s role in shaping the policy debate
As Africa advances with AfCFTA implementation, the question of how to harmonise road transport services cannot be ignored. This is where SSATP can make a distinctive contribution.
By providing analytical work, such as input to the IRU–World Bank Road Transport Services Reform Guide and its study on Corridor Management Institutions, SSATP helps clarify the choices facing policymakers and highlight the practical implications of different approaches.
Equally important, SSATP serves as a trusted platform for dialogue. Through its Regional Economic Communities Transport Coordination Committee meetings and engagement with the African Union, the programme can create the space for governments, regional bodies, and the private sector to deliberate on the future of road transport regulation.
In this way, SSATP can help ensure that road transport and logistics services – the missing link in AfCFTA – are kept at the centre of policy discussions on Africa’s economic integration.