Trust as the Infrastructure of Continental Integration and Prosperity

Trust as the Infrastructure of Continental Integration and ProsperityAmbassador Selma Malika Haddadi, AU Commission Deputy ChairpersonDate | 11 November 2026

One of the most demanding responsibilities entrusted to the Office of the Deputy Chairperson of the African Union Commission is to help ensure that the ambitions collectively defined by our Member States have, over time, the means required for their implementation. This responsibility is often understood as a matter of budgets, resource mobilisation or financial balance. It is, naturally, all of these things. Yet over time, I have come to believe that it also raises a deeper question, one that goes beyond financing mechanisms alone and touches upon the way in which we take ownership of, and organise, our collective capacity to act in pursuit of our shared ambitions.

The contributions of Member States remain, and will remain, the political, institutional and financial foundation of our Union. They represent far more than an accounting commitment; they express the sovereign will of African States to carry together a continental project that transcends each of them individually. Nothing can substitute for this. Yet that fundamental principle does not relieve us of another responsibility. As the implementation of Agenda 2063 progressively takes shape, as the expectations of our citizens grow, and as the responsibilities entrusted to our continental organisation, our Regional Economic Communities and our governments expand, an unavoidable question arises: how can the African Union progressively strengthen its capacity to act without ever calling into question the central role of the States from which it derives its legitimacy?

My conviction is that the answer lies neither in greater dependence on external financing nor in any substitution for the responsibilities of Member States. Rather, it requires us to learn how to mobilise more effectively the resources that Africa itself has brought forth: its banks and financial institutions, its investors and businesses, its foundations, its diasporas, its universities and research centres, and the new generation of entrepreneurs already transforming the economic face of the continent. Yet when I speak of these resources, I am not thinking first and foremost about financing itself, but about the relationships that make financing possible and investment more compelling.

Africa does not lack resources. It now has companies capable of investing across the continent, increasingly robust financial institutions, institutional investors, sovereign wealth funds, pension funds, an emerging philanthropic sector and a diaspora whose financial, intellectual and entrepreneurial capacities have probably never been greater. Taken individually, each of these actors represents a considerable force. Yet their collective potential remains far greater than the sum of their individual capacities, because they too often continue to operate in worlds that intersect more often than they truly meet.

I have gradually come to understand that the real question is therefore no longer simply how to mobilise more resources. It is how to create the conditions in which those resources would naturally choose to converge around a common ambition. In other words, before financing becomes a financial challenge, it becomes a challenge of cooperation and ownership.

‘…the real question is therefore no longer simply how to mobilise more resources. It is how to create the conditions in which those resources would naturally choose to converge around a common ambition. In other words, before financing becomes a financial challenge, it becomes a challenge of cooperation and ownership.’

And every form of lasting cooperation ultimately raises the same question: that of trust. Yet trust itself is not a single reality.

There is, first, the trust that international investors, partners and markets place in the continent. It influences Africa’s attractiveness, the cost of capital and the ability of our economies to attract the investment they need. This confidence remains essential, and it will continue to be so. But it depends on many factors that extend far beyond the responsibilities of any continental institution.

There is then another, quieter form of trust, one that is built among Africans themselves. It is the trust that leads an African bank to finance a company in another country on the continent, an investor to believe in a project beyond national borders, a university to collaborate with a laboratory in a neighbouring country, or entrepreneurs to build regional value chains together. The further this confidence develops, the more integration ceases to be merely a political ambition and becomes an economic reality.

Yet the reflection that led me to write these lines concerns a third form of trust, more discreet still, but perhaps the most consequential for an organisation such as the African Union.

It emerges in the space where Heads of State, public officials, pan-African institutions and the continent’s economic actors can gradually come to know one another better, understand each other’s constraints, identify opportunities and build together a shared understanding of the common good, while developing a genuine sense of ownership over it.

A minister and a business leader may want precisely the same things: greater investment, more jobs and a more competitive economy. Yet the former carries responsibility for the public interest, social balances, sovereignty and the rhythms of political life, while the latter must contend with risk, competition, the cost of capital and the need to make decisions quickly. Neither is wrong. They are simply looking at the same reality from two different sets of responsibilities. Too often, however, these two worlds meet only once their respective constraints have already become sources of disagreement.

Such trust cannot be decreed into existence. Nor does it emerge from an annual conference or a common declaration.

It is built gradually, when dialogue becomes a habit, when each side learns to understand the constraints of the other before defending its own, and when relationships are able to survive disagreement because they rest upon sufficiently strong mutual understanding.

I believe this is precisely where the African Union can make one of its most useful contributions, by providing an institutional setting in which such relationships can take root and develop.

Every inter-governmental organisation lives by the confidence placed in it by the Member States that created it. That is the very foundation of its legitimacy. But the great institutions of the twenty-first century will probably also need to learn how to build the confidence of the economic actors they are capable of bringing together around a shared project of integration and common prosperity, an ambition already articulated more than sixty years ago by our founding fathers. As part of its effort to deliver on the mandate Member States entrusted to it, this role of mobilizing confidence seeks to help create shared sense of ownership around the objective of giving collectively defined ambitions a capacity for action greater than the simple sum of individual efforts.

For if the real challenge is increasingly to connect more effectively the forces Africa already possesses and channel their shared power into delivering on our collective objective, it becomes impossible to think about financing without also considering the way in which our economies have historically been organised. Resources never circulate at random. They follow pathways that societies have progressively drawn over time. Understanding the challenges of today and tomorrow therefore sometimes requires us to revisit the routes of yesterday.

For several centuries, Africa did not merely see its resources exploited and appropriated; its economic space was also organised according to a logic that was not its own. Trade routes, ports, railways, infrastructure and, at times, even economic boundaries were shaped above all by the same imperative: to connect African territories to the major industrial centres of the wider world far more than to their immediate neighbours. The purpose was no longer to circulate wealth within the continent, as the great trans-Saharan, Sahelian and Swahili trading networks had once done, nurturing powerful African urban centres. It was increasingly to organise its extraction and movement outward.

The deepest legacy of that period may therefore be not only material, but relational.

An economy is also a geography of relationships. It reveals who trades with whom, who finances whom, who produces for whom and, ultimately, who learns to trust whom. For a long time, African economies became more accustomed to trading with the rest of the world than with one another, to seeking external rather than continental partners, and to looking towards major international economic centres before fully discovering each other. Habits of cooperation were built elsewhere. Habits of trust were, too. None of these trajectories, however, is irreversible.

‘ For a long time, African economies became more accustomed to trading with the rest of the world than with one another, to seeking external rather than continental partners, and to looking towards major international economic centres before fully discovering each other. Habits of cooperation were built elsewhere. Habits of trust were, too. None of these trajectories, however, is irreversible.’

Since independence, successive generations of African women and men have worked precisely to redraw them. The Organisation of African Unity and later the African Union, the Regional Economic Communities, African financial institutions, Agenda 2063 and its flagship projects, including the African Continental Free Trade Area, as well as the emergence of companies operating across several regions of the continent, are all part of the same historical movement: progressively reconnecting Africa with itself.

Ultimately, economies do not develop merely because they trade more. They develop because, through greater exchange, they progressively come to know one another. Every successful investment makes the next one easier. Every lasting partnership reduces uncertainty a little further. Every project undertaken together creates habits of cooperation that make future initiatives less risky and more natural.

Through sustained interaction, societies build more than markets. They create an invisible resource. That resource has a name: trust.

It may be the most discreet infrastructure of all. It appears on no map and is measured neither in kilometres nor in megawatts, yet it shortens the distance between decision and action, brings the State closer to enterprise, research closer to investment, institutions closer to innovators, and ambitions closer to the means required to realise them. Economies capable of organising such proximity enjoy an advantage that statistics still struggle to capture, but that investors recognise almost immediately.

This intuition resonates with the work of Elinor Ostrom, recipient of the 2009 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. In examining the conditions that enable communities to manage common resources sustainably, she observed that when individuals develop shared norms and practices of reciprocity, they build social capital upon which durable institutional arrangements can be constructed. Trust, in this understanding, is no longer merely a moral disposition. It becomes a collective asset capable of producing stronger institutions and more durable cooperation.

This reflection is not confined to the African continent. In Nairobi, on October 2026, at the Trust Summit, I had the opportunity to emphasise how deeply our collective capacity to act depends on the quality of the relationships we build. The theme of the 81st session of the United Nations General Assembly gives that reflection a global resonance today, placing the restoration of trust at the heart of the transformation of multilateralism.

It may be here that Africa’s next economic conversation begins, and the African Union is particularly well placed to provide a natural institutional space in which that conversation can be initiated, sustained and translated into shared benefit.

For a long time, we have thought of African integration as the progressive accumulation of institutions, agreements, infrastructure and markets. That work was indispensable and remains far from complete. Yet as these foundations take shape, another imperative is emerging. Integration is no longer only about bringing economies closer together; it must also bring closer, in a lasting way, the women and men who will be responsible for making that integration live. The next stage of our integration may therefore be less institutional than relational.

‘ Integration is no longer only about bringing economies closer together; it must also bring closer, in a lasting way, the women and men who will be responsible for making that integration live. The next stage of our integration may therefore be less institutional than relational.’

It is precisely in this space that the African Union can exercise a particular responsibility. Without substituting itself for Member States, the private sector or markets, it possesses a distinctive capacity: to create the conditions for sustained dialogue among actors who often pursue the same ambitions without necessarily sharing the same constraints or time horizons. In this sense, its role extends beyond policy coordination; it can also act as a catalyst of trust in the service of Africa’s common interest.

Infrastructure connects territories. Institutions organise responsibilities. Trust connects wills and anchors ownership. And it is often from the meeting of these forces that transformations emerge which endure and change the course of history.