AfCFTA and Intra-African Travel: What Border Crossings Will Look Like in 2030

The queue at Kasumbalesa stretched 56 kilometres into the Democratic Republic of Congo in January 2025. Even after border authorities pushed extra trucks through, drivers still faced roughly 24 hours before their tyres touched Congolese tarmac.

Kasumbalesa is the busiest commercial crossing between Zambia and the DRC, and it captures, in traffic-jam form, the entire gap between what the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) promises and what travellers and traders actually experience at the continent’s frontiers. If AfCFTA border crossings are meant to define a new era of continental mobility, Kasumbalesa is a stubborn reminder of how far that era still sits from daily reality.

AfCFTA has done more for the movement of copper, tea, and cocoa than it has for the movement of people. Unless African governments treat human mobility as central to the trade agreement rather than a side conversation, the borders travellers meet in 2030 will look uncomfortably similar to the ones they meet today.

The RCA Argument:

The Trade Deal That Forgot to Move People

African leaders signed the AfCFTA in Kigali in March 2018, and the agreement entered into force after the Sahrawi Republic deposited the 22nd ratification on 29 April 2019. By May 2026, it counted 54 signatories out of the African Union’s 55 member states, with 49 having deposited instruments of ratification on paper, the largest free trade area in the world by country count, linking a market of roughly 1.4 billion people and a combined GDP above $3.4 trillion.

The companion agreement, built specifically for people, the AU Protocol on Free Movement of Persons, tells a different story entirely. Adopted alongside AfCFTA in 2018, it needs ratification from 15 member states before it can take effect. Eight years later, only four countries, Rwanda, Niger, São Tomé and Príncipe, and Mali, have ratified it. When African heads of state gathered in El Alamein, Egypt, for the AU’s Mid-Year Coordination Meeting from 24 to 27 June 2026, campaigners argued that the stalled ratification was no longer a technical oversight; it had become political reluctance dressed up as delay.

Travel is, in some respects, getting harder rather than easier. The 2025 Africa Visa Openness Index recorded a rise in the share of trips requiring a visa arranged in advance, from 47.1% to 51.1%, the first time that figure has crossed the halfway mark in years, while visa-on-arrival availability fell to its lowest recorded level. Four countries that previously granted visas on arrival switched to requiring applications beforehand, moving directly against AfCFTA’s own logic.

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Why AfCFTA Border Crossings Still Move at Yesterday’s Speed

Kasumbalesa is not an isolated failure; it is what happens when five regional trade corridors converge on a single post never built for that volume. More than 1,500 trucks were stranded there in 2025 after the DRC introduced a new electronic seals clearance system, forcing Lusaka and Kinshasa into an emergency deal to clear 500 trucks a day and extend operations.

Some crossings show what is achievable elsewhere. Chirundu, on the Zambia-Zimbabwe border, became Sub-Saharan Africa’s first one-stop border post in 2009. Beitbridge, between Zimbabwe and South Africa, has drawn $44 million in private concession financing to modernise its facilities. These remain proof of concept rather than the norm.

For passenger travel specifically, the friction is bureaucratic rather than physical: visa applications, proof-of-funds requirements, and digital immigration systems that rarely talk to each other across a border. A traveller flying between two AfCFTA member states can easily spend longer completing paperwork than they spend airborne.

Aviation has, at least, moved further than road transport. The Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM) had 38 signatory states by mid-2026, together accounting for close to 80 per cent of the continent’s air traffic, and African aviation regulators adopted the Lomé Declaration on 16 June 2026 to push implementation harder still.

More than 110 new intra-African routes have launched under the initiative, 19 of them built on fifth-freedom rights allowing airlines to carry passengers between two other African countries. Yet only about a fifth of African air traffic actually stays within the continent, and a journey from Tunisia to southern Africa can still take over 13 hours, often routed through the Gulf or Europe rather than another African hub.

The Money Is Already Moving

Where AfCFTA has genuinely reshaped behaviour is in trade value, and that matters for travel because commerce usually drags mobility policy along behind it, sooner or later. Afreximbank’s African Trade and Economic Outlook 2026, published on 30 March 2026, forecasts intra-African trade climbing 10 per cent to $230 billion in 2026, up from $210 billion the year before, helped by the Pan-African Payment and Settlement System (PAPSS) cutting foreign exchange costs by 20 to 30 per cent.

Under the Guided Trade Initiative, launched in Accra in October 2022, ten countries were actively trading under AfCFTA preferences by February 2025, covering goods from ceramic tiles to processed tea. None of that required a single visa reform. Traders and the people who carry their goods still need one, even as the goods themselves cross with growing ease.

A handful of countries never waited for the protocol’s fifteenth ratification. Benin, The Gambia, Rwanda, and Seychelles admit any African passport holder without a visa, and ECOWAS’s decades-old free movement protocol already lets West Africans cross member borders on a national ID card alone.

These examples prove that the model works at the national level long before it works at the continental level. The obstacle is coordination, not feasibility, but 2026 has also shown how fragile that model can be under pressure. Between April and May, a citizen movement calling itself “March and March” staged demonstrations against undocumented migrants in Pretoria, Johannesburg, and Durban. The protests turned violent and, in some cases, fatal, and targeted African and Asian nationals specifically, while state authorities faced criticism for an inadequate response.

Nigeria threatened retaliatory measures and repatriated hundreds of its citizens; Ghana repatriated more than 1,000 and provided them with psychosocial support. A trade area that assumes migrants will find safety and legal protection in host countries cannot take that assumption for granted while such scenes play out in one of its founding economies.

What AfCFTA Border Crossings Could Look Like by 2030

If the Free Movement Protocol reaches its fifteen-ratification threshold before the decade ends, Phase I would grant visa-free entry for three-month stays across ratifying states, with residence and business-establishment rights following in Phases II and III only after further African Union review.

Layer that onto PAPSS’s continuing expansion, a growing network of one-stop border posts modelled on Chirundu, and SAATM’s membership climbing past 38 states, and the mechanical pieces of a genuinely different border experience already exist. Afreximbank’s own growth scenarios put continental trade at $300–350 billion by 2030 under steady implementation, a trajectory that would be difficult to sustain without a parallel loosening of how people, not just goods, cross frontiers.

What 2030 will not deliver, on current form, is a borderless continent. It is more likely to deliver a two-speed Africa: a cluster of states, Rwanda, Ghana, Kenya, Benin, and Seychelles, among them, where AfCFTA border crossings genuinely resemble what the agreement promised, and a much larger group where the protocol remains unratified, visas stay mandatory, and Kasumbalesa-style congestion keeps building on the roads carrying the continent’s trade.

The real test of AfCFTA was never going to happen at the negotiating table in Kigali. It happens at crossings like Kasumbalesa, where the queue is real, the wait is real, and the distance between treaty and tarmac is measured in hours, not communiqués.

Want to understand how these policy shifts are already reshaping trips across the continent? Rex Clarke Adventures tracks the routes, visa rules, and border reforms that actually affect how Africans and visitors move through Africa. Read our other travel policy features to plan smarter and stay ahead of what’s changing.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) And Answers

What is the AfCFTA Free Movement of Persons Protocol, and why does it matter for travel?

It is a separate agreement, adopted alongside AfCFTA in 2018, that would let Africans travel visa-free across ratifying countries in its first phase. It needs 15 ratifications to take effect and has only secured four as of mid-2026, which is why most African borders still require visas despite the trade deal.

Can Africans currently travel visa-free under AfCFTA?

Not yet, and not because of AfCFTA itself. AfCFTA governs trade in goods and services. Visa-free travel depends on the separate Free Movement Protocol, which remains unratified by most member states, and on individual country policies such as those in Benin, The Gambia, Rwanda, and Seychelles.

Why do African border crossings like Kasumbalesa still face such long delays?

Ageing infrastructure, overlapping customs systems that were never designed for current trade volumes, and slow adoption of one-stop border posts all contribute. Kasumbalesa alone sits at the junction of five regional trade corridors, which concentrates congestion that AfCFTA’s tariff reforms do nothing to resolve on their own.

Will African air travel improve by 2030?

Likely yes, though unevenly. The Single African Air Transport Market already covers close to 80 per cent of the continent’s air traffic through 38 signatory states, and new routes are opening steadily. Full liberalisation, including cheaper fares and shorter connections, still depends on individual governments implementing what they have signed.

Which African countries already allow visa-free entry for other Africans?

Benin, The Gambia, Rwanda, and Seychelles currently admit African passport holders without visas. ECOWAS member states also allow free movement among themselves using a national ID card, offering a working model for what continental free movement could eventually look like.