Reflections on the African futures of regional integration and challenges to the marginalized small-scale traders across the borders of the partner states of the East African Community (EAC))

Abstract

Despite the existence of formal trade, the phenomenon of informal trade, between the border people, continues to be dominant. Based on the theory of economic integration, we examined the drivers for this informal trade. Using interdisciplinary approach, we look at the resilience of border traders, the history and economies of scale behind such trade and how traders straddle formal and informal trade. Economic integration is the unification of economic policies between different states, through the partial or full abolition of tariff and non- tariff restrictions on trade. In the Malabo Declaration of June 2014, African countries committed themselves tripling the level of intra-African agricultural trade and service by 2025, fast-tracking the African Continental Free Trade Area and adopting Common External Tariff (CET) on external goods (Bouet, Pace and Glauber, 2018). Bashir Saad Ibrahim (2018) has examined the challenges and prospects of cross-border trade in West Africa. between Nigeria and Niger and he proposes viable solutions on how to improve cross border trade between the two nations and Africa in general, a study which is germane to our own analysis of the drivers to trade between Kenya and Ugandan borders.