On paper, the African Continental Free Trade Area has opened a market of more than a billion consumers to a manufacturer in Nairobi or Thika. In practice, the journey from a Kenyan factory gate to a buyer in Accra or Kinshasa is so slow and so expensive that many small firms never attempt it. The tariff line has come down; the cost of moving the goods has not.

That gap is the subject of a recent assessment by the Kenya Association of Manufacturers, which found that high freight costs and long clearance times are steadily eroding the competitiveness of Kenyan small and medium-sized enterprises across African markets. The finding, reported by Xinhua, reframes a familiar complaint as a structural problem: the binding constraint on continental trade is no longer the tariff schedule but the corridor.

The Real Tariff: What It Costs to Move a Container

For a large exporter, freight is a line item to be optimised. For an SME, it can be the difference between a viable order and a loss. When a consignment sits at a border post for days, the cost is not only the demurrage and the warehousing; it is the working capital frozen in transit, the buyer who switches to a closer supplier, and the perishable margin that spoils on the road. Kenyan goods leaving through Mombasa on the Northern Corridor compete against producers far nearer their customers, and every extra day of clearance is a discount handed to a rival. The KAM assessment makes the point plainly: it is logistics, not industrial capacity, that locks many firms out.

The corridor is the real tariff, and small firms pay it twice.

The Continental Promise and the Local Reality

The AfCFTA was designed to let an East African manufacturer treat the continent as a single market. Yet a free-trade agreement removes only the duty at the border; it does nothing about the queue in front of it. For Kenya, whose manufacturers supply much of the East African Community and aspire to sell well beyond it, the unevenness is acute. A firm in Nairobi can reach a Kampala buyer through the EAC Customs Union with relative ease, but a buyer in West or Central Africa lies behind a chain of borders, documents and transhipment points that multiply cost at each stage. The promise is continental; the friction is intensely local.

A market you cannot afford to reach is not yet a market.

The Fix Is Process, Not Concrete

The encouraging part of the KAM finding is that the worst of the cost is procedural, and procedure can be changed faster than ports can be built. Faster clearance through harmonised documentation, pre-arrival processing, and the digital single-window systems that agencies such as Trademark Africa have championed along the Northern Corridor would cut the dwell time that punishes small shippers most. The EAC has the institutional machinery — its Customs Union and Common Market protocols — to standardise much of this. None of it requires new roads; it requires the existing ones to be cleared more quickly.

The cheapest infrastructure Kenya can build is a shorter queue.

What an Operator Should Do With This

For a Kenyan founder weighing a continental order, the practical lesson is to cost the corridor before costing the factory. Build landed-cost and clearance-time assumptions into the price, group shipments to spread fixed freight, and choose the routing and clearing agent as deliberately as the product. For policymakers at the National Treasury and the trade ministry, the KAM assessment is a reminder that the next gain in export competitiveness will come less from new incentives than from removing the friction that already exists. The tariff war on the continent is largely won. The freight war has barely begun.

Kenya’s manufacturers have the goods; what they need is a clear road to the buyer.