Why lower air travel costs matter for Africa’s growth

DAR ES SALAAM: RWANDA’S Minister of Trade and Industry, Antoine Marie Kajangwe, has called for African countries to reduce taxes, fees and levies on air travel, saying high costs are limiting movement and business opportunities across the continent.

Kajangwe made the remarks during the closing session of the two-day African Mindset Reset Forum in Kigali on August 26.

He said Rwanda was ready to work with other countries and the private sector to lower the cost of air travel and advance the implementation of the Single African Air Transport Market.

This call is not merely a technical fix to ticket pricing — it goes to the heart of one of the continent’s oldest paradoxes: Africa is geographically vast and economically fragmented, yet its people, goods and capital struggle to move freely within it.

Kajangwe’s remarks reflect a growing frustration among reform-minded leaders that high-cost air travel is quietly undermining the continent’s broader integration agenda.

The cost of staying grounded

Africa has long had some of the world’s most expensive air travel relative to distance travelled, a problem driven in large part by government-imposed charges rather than airline pricing alone.

When taxes, airport fees and regulatory levies stack up, the effect is to price out precisely the kind of movement that regional integration is meant to encourage — business travellers, entrepreneurs, students and tourists who might otherwise fly between African capitals rather than routing through Europe or the Gulf.

This matters because intra-African trade and mobility remain stubbornly low compared to other regions.

A continent that aspires to a single market, as embodied in the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), cannot function as one if moving between its own countries by air remains more expensive and cumbersome than flying to another continent entirely.

Air connectivity is not a peripheral issue to trade policy — it is the physical infrastructure that trade agreements depend on to translate into actual commerce.

Revenue versus growth: a policy trade-off

The minister’s observation that many of these fees exist to raise government revenue and fund infrastructure points to the real tension underlying this debate.

Governments facing tight fiscal space understandably look to aviation — often associated with wealthier travellers and businesses — as a convenient revenue source.

But this creates a self-defeating cycle: high costs suppress travel demand, which in turn limits the growth of the very tax base governments are trying to tap.

Lower cost, higher-volume travel can, in principle, generate more economic activity — and more indirect revenue through tourism, trade and business investment — than a smaller number of expensively taxed flights.

This is the same logic Rwanda has already tested with its visa policy. By opening its borders to visa free or visa-on-arrival access for African travellers years before most peers, Kigali demonstrated that easing barriers to entry could work as an economic strategy rather than a revenue risk — and, notably, encouraged other African states to follow suit.

Kajangwe’s invocation of this precedent is a deliberate signal: unilateral action, rather than waiting for continent-wide consensus, can shift regional norms.

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The unfinished business of the Single African Air Transport Market

The push for cheaper air travel is also inseparable from the stalled progress of the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM), an initiative launched in 2018 to liberalise Africa’s skies by allowing airlines greater freedom to operate across borders.

Years on, implementation remains partial, with many governments continuing to protect national carriers and impose restrictive bilateral agreements.

High fees and levies are one more layer of protectionism, whether intentional or incidental, that keeps African aviation fragmented and costly.

Kajangwe’s willingness to frame this as something Rwanda would pursue “unilaterally” reflects a broader critique running through his remarks: that Africa’s integration agenda suffers less from a lack of frameworks than from a lack of delivery.

AfCFTA, he noted, has moved from paper to a functioning system — but functioning is not the same as transformative.

Reducing air travel costs is one of the more concrete, achievable steps that could convert integration frameworks into lived economic reality for businesspeople and travellers, rather than remaining aspirational policy.

Why this is a test case, not a side issue

What makes this debate significant is that it doubles as a test of the “delivery mindset” Kajangwe explicitly called for — results over process, action over further study.

Air travel costs are a policy lever that governments largely control directly, unlike many of the more complex, multilateral challenges facing African trade integration.

If African states cannot coordinate — or act unilaterally, as Rwanda suggests it might — on something as tangible as airport fees and travel taxes, it raises harder questions about the prospects for deeper, more politically sensitive reforms under AfCFTA, from customs harmonisation to free movement of people. In that sense, cheaper flights are not just about convenience or tourism revenue.

They are a proxy for whether Africa’s integration project can move from declarations and forums to policies that visibly change how easily people, ideas and capital move across the continent.