By Adonis Byemelwa*
Following the Kigali CEO Forum 2026, Pan African Visions Senior Reporter in East Africa spoke with Amne Sued, founder of Shikana Group, on East Africa’s investment climate, regional integration and the AfCFTA.
Regulatory Barriers to the Scaling of East African Enterprises: As an international investment lawyer and expert in cross-border transactions, what is your view on the core regulatory bottlenecks holding back the expansion of East African enterprises?
The real bottleneck is not ambition, capital or entrepreneurial capacity; East Africa has all three. The bottleneck is that our regulatory systems have not yet fully adjusted to the speed, structure and sophistication of the businesses we are now producing. For many East African enterprises, expansion is slowed by fragmented licensing and approval processes across agencies, uncertainty in tax, foreign exchange, employment, and sector-specific compliance, inconsistent implementation of regional integration commitments, and the lack of predictable, commercially minded dispute-resolution and enforcement mechanisms.
A company may be ready to scale from Tanzania into Kenya, Uganda or Rwanda. However, it is often forced to re-learn the regulatory system from scratch in each market, duplicate filings, renegotiate tax assumptions, restructure ownership, and manage different interpretations of what should ideally be a more integrated regional market. East Africa does not need deregulation. It needs smarter regulation: clearer rules, faster approvals, better inter-agency coordination, more predictable enforcement, and a regional legal architecture that matches the ambition of our entrepreneurs.
Coordination Efficiency of Cross-Border Legal Frameworks: You hold legal qualifications in three jurisdictions: Switzerland, mainland Tanzania, and Zanzibar. How do you assess the level of coordination among African cross-border legal rules?
Africa is moving in the right direction, but the reality is that cross-border legal coordination across the continent is lagging behind the pace of trade, investment, and entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs, investors, and capital move across borders with increasing sophistication, yet the legal frameworks governing taxation, dispute resolution, licensing, foreign investment, digital trade, labour mobility, and capital flows remain heavily fragmented.
One example is the recent growing role of the East African Community Competition Authority, which represents an important step toward regional coordination in competition regulation, mergers and acquisitions. A more coordinated regional competition framework has the potential to accelerate expansion, mergers and acquisitions, and make them faster, more affordable, and more harmonised for businesses operating across the region.
I believe Africa must now move from symbolic integration to operational integration. Harmonisation is not only about signing protocols or adopting frameworks; it is about ensuring that institutions coordinate effectively, approvals become more predictable, enforcement becomes more consistent, and businesses can move capital, services and operations across borders with confidence.
Financing Access Gap for Women-Led Enterprises: In line with the focus of the Kigali Forum, as an operator of Shikana Group, how can the financing gap for women-led enterprises be addressed?
The financing gap for women-led enterprises in Africa is not simply a capital problem; it is fundamentally an ecosystem problem. Across East Africa, I have met extraordinary women building businesses in manufacturing, technology, logistics, agriculture, media, mining services and trade. However, many of them remain excluded from meaningful financing not because they lack capability, but because they often lack access to structured legal support, investor readiness, formalisation tools, governance systems, financial documentation and strategic networks that institutional capital requires before deploying funds.
At Shikana Group, we have increasingly approached this challenge from a broader perspective. Financing cannot be separated from legal empowerment, regulatory understanding and business structuring. We are already beginning to work with members of the Tanzania Women Chamber of Commerce as part of that process, because we strongly believe that the future of African entrepreneurship will depend on democratising access to strategic legal and business knowledge, not just access to financing.
I also believe we must rethink how African financial institutions assess risk. Many women-led enterprises are judged by traditional collateral frameworks rather than their growth potential, execution capability, and market opportunity.
Implementation Experience of Tanzania’s National Strategy: You participated in the development of Tanzania’s Vision 2050. What investment promotion models from Rwanda and Kenya are worth learning from?
One of the most important lessons I took from participating in the development of Tanzania’s Vision 2050 is that investment attraction today is no longer only about natural resources, market size or geography. Increasingly, it is about institutional efficiency, predictability and the overall experience of doing business.
Rwanda has done a phenomenal job over the past two decades in transforming its investment climate and building a reputation for speed, coordination, and predictability, precisely the factors serious investors look for when allocating capital. Rwanda understood very early that investors are not only comparing countries based on tax incentives or labour costs; they are comparing the ease of navigating institutions, obtaining approvals, resolving problems and executing projects without unnecessary delays.
At the same time, Kenya has demonstrated the power of private-sector dynamism, financial ecosystem development, innovation, and entrepreneurship. Nairobi has positioned itself as a regional commercial and technology hub because Kenya created an environment where capital markets, banking systems, venture capital, telecommunications and entrepreneurial culture evolved relatively aggressively compared to many other markets on the continent.
For Tanzania, the opportunity is to identify what works internationally and adapt it intelligently to Tanzania’s realities and long-term ambitions under Vision 2050.
Potential of East Africa as a Global Intermediate Processing Hub: Against the backdrop of shifts in global trade routes and the relocation of manufacturing capacity to Africa, can East Africa develop into a global intermediate processing hub?
Absolutely. I believe East Africa is entering one of the most important strategic windows in its modern economic history. The shifts we are witnessing in global trade routes, supply chains and manufacturing geography are not temporary disruptions; they represent a structural reorganisation of the global economy.
East Africa is exceptionally well-positioned to benefit from this transition. The region sits strategically between Asia, the Middle East, Europe and the rest of Africa, with access to major maritime routes through the Indian Ocean. Countries such as Tanzania and Kenya already possess the foundations that could support large-scale industrial and processing growth: ports, expanding infrastructure corridors, access to regional markets, improved energy capacity, significant mineral and agricultural resources, and a young population.
Africa can no longer afford to remain primarily an exporter of raw materials while importing finished products at a premium. The future opportunity lies in intermediate processing, value addition and regional manufacturing ecosystems. Whether we are speaking about agricultural products, critical minerals, textiles, graphite, battery minerals, gemstones or industrial inputs, East Africa has the potential to position itself as a processing and industrialisation hub serving both global and continental markets.
Implementation Outcomes of AfCFTA: In line with the agenda of the Kigali Presidential Forum, what is the actual on-the-ground implementation effect of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement?
The African Continental Free Trade Area is one of the most important economic and geopolitical projects Africa has undertaken in modern history because, for the first time, the continent is attempting to create a truly integrated market at scale rather than operating as fragmented national economies competing individually for external capital.
The AfCFTA has absolutely changed the strategic conversation. Governments, investors, manufacturers and regional businesses are increasingly thinking continentally rather than purely nationally. At the same time, many businesses operating on the ground still encounter the same practical barriers: customs delays, inconsistent standards, fragmented regulatory systems, currency constraints, infrastructure gaps, overlapping trade regimes and non-tariff barriers that continue to slow cross-border commerce.
I also believe the real impact of the AfCFTA will not come only from tariff reductions. The real transformation will come from scale. A continental market changes how investors think about production, manufacturing and supply chains. A factory in East Africa no longer needs to think only about serving one national market; it can begin positioning itself within a much larger African consumer and industrial ecosystem.
*Culled from June Edition of PAV Magazine
