Anyone who has spent time in Europe has seen it. You can book a Friday flight from London to Brussels the way you would book a bus ticket. £30 return, one-hour flight, different country, done before the weekend starts. I kept thinking about that when I got back to East Africa.
A one-way ticket from Dar es Salaam to Nairobi—two cities in the same region where people speak the same language, eat similar food, and share centuries of the same coastline—costs somewhere between US$200 and US$260 on a good day.
A return on Kenya Airways will set you back US$400, sometimes pushing even higher. The distance is roughly the same as London to Vienna, and I can get to Vienna for under £50 on any given Tuesday. But Nairobi? US$400+ return. For a 75-minute flight!
To put that in perspective: a return flight from London to Nairobi on Kenya Airways—a nine-hour intercontinental journey—can be as low as US$600 return sometimes. In other words, flying between two East African countries can cost you roughly the same, or more, than flying from Europe to East Africa. Those numbers alone should tell you something about where we actually are with East African integration.
We talk about brotherhood and shared destiny and removing barriers to trade. But if you are an ordinary person, a student, a small business owner, someone trying to attend a conference or meet a supplier or just visit a friend in another capital, the biggest barrier is not a visa. It is the price of the plane ticket.
Wildebeest migration
When Kenyan President William Ruto addressed Tanzania’s Parliament in Dodoma on May 5, 2026, he used the wildebeest migration as his centrepiece image. “Each year, during the great wildebeest migration, millions of animals move freely between the READ MORE: President Ruto Calls for Decisive Regional Integration, Pledges Kenya’s Support for Tanzania’s Development
Serengeti and Masai Mara…What nature has made seamless, policy must not make difficult.” It was a good line. But sitting with it, I kept arriving at the same thought: the wildebeest do not need to check airfare prices.
The day before that speech, at the Tanzania-Kenya Business Forum, both President Ruto and President Samia Suluhu Hassan signed eight bilateral agreements, committed to removing all remaining barriers to trade by June 30, and announced that the forum would now become an annual event.
All of this is genuinely encouraging. But it raises a question nobody seemed to be asking inside that hall. If this forum is going to be annual, and if it is supposed to serve not just the largest companies but also the small and medium-sized business owners, the emerging traders, the startup founders who are actually the backbone of regional commerce, how much is it going to cost them to attend?
Because right now, for a business owner in Mwanza or Kigali or Kampala, a return flight to next year’s edition could easily cost US$400 to US$600. That is a financial barrier in itself.
The numbers tell a story
The numbers on trade are real. Trade between East African Community countries grew 27 per cent between June 2024 and June 2025, reaching US$18 billion. Trade between Tanzania and Kenya alone hit US$860 million in 2025.
But President Ruto himself flagged at the business forum that the two countries lost close to US$100 million in trade between 2024 and 2025 because of barriers on goods. We measure the cost of barriers on goods carefully. We have almost no equivalent urgency around the cost of barriers on people.
Economists have a name for this: when people can move around easily, ideas move too. Traders meet suppliers. Entrepreneurs meet investors. Students build networks that become businesses years later. Economies grow faster when people can actually interact with each other.
The deals that happen over a meal, the knowledge that passes between a trader in Dar and a supplier in Mombasa, the trust that builds between people who keep running into each other—these are not minor things. They are literally how economies develop.
The hard infrastructure we are building—the pipelines, the refineries, the port corridors—all of this is part of a real integration story. But integration is not only about the infrastructure you can see. It is about whether the person who was not invited to the business forum can still participate in the economy that integration is supposed to build.
The tourism question
And then there is the tourism question, which is perhaps the most concrete illustration of what we are leaving on the table. Tanzania brought in 2.14 million international visitors in 2024, earning US$3.9 billion from tourism.
Kenya brought in about 2.4 million. Between them, two of the most spectacular natural destinations on earth. And yet most visitors who come to East Africa choose one country and go home, because crossing between them is expensive and, in some cases, genuinely absurd.
The Serengeti and the Maasai Mara are the same ecosystem. The same Mara River. The same 1.5 million wildebeest migrate between them every year. A visitor standing in the Maasai Mara looking south is looking at Tanzania.
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But if they want to see the Tanzanian side, they cannot cross directly. There is no border crossing within the parks. They have to exit, drive hours to Isebania or Namanga, wait at the border—sometimes for hours—swap vehicles, because Tanzanian-registered cars are banned from Kenyan parks and vice versa.
The full journey takes a minimum of a full driving day. The wildebeest do it in an afternoon. Visitors who might have spent two weeks contributing to both economies choose one. Both countries lose. Every season.
Long-term vision
There is a longer-term answer, and I want to be fair about it because the ambition is real. The East African Standard Gauge Railway, if it reaches its vision, would change what movement in this region feels like.
Tanzania’s railway is already running between Dar es Salaam and Dodoma, with extensions advancing toward Mwanza and eventually the borders of Rwanda and Burundi. Kenya’s Mombasa-Nairobi line has been operational since 2017.
One of the agreements signed during President Ruto’s May visit includes a study on direct railway connectivity between Tanzania and Kenya. If those connections come—and I hope they do—a future where you board a train in Dar and wake up in Nairobi becomes possible.
But that future is not here yet. Infrastructure of this scale takes years, sometimes decades. And the thing about time is that it is not neutral. Every year that affordable movement between these countries does not exist is a year in which the economic benefits of regional connection do not materialise.
Open the skies
So what can actually be done while we wait for the railways? Aviation liberalisation. Opening up regional skies to genuine low-cost competition, implementing the Single African Air Transport Market commitments, and removing the protections that allow national carriers to charge their nearest neighbours out of the market.
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This worked in Europe. It is documented. It just requires governments to accept that a national carrier charging US$400 for a 75-minute flight to the next country is not, in any meaningful sense, serving the national interest.
The visa battle was the right one to fight, and real progress was made. Most East African Community citizens can now cross between member states without a visa or with one on arrival. But the flight price has taken the visa’s place as the real wall. And that wall is taller.
The integration story is half-written. The goods are moving. The people are not. Until we fix that, the wildebeest will keep outpacing us.
Maaher Bhaloo is an International Business, Finance and Economics graduate from the University of Manchester’s Alliance Manchester Business School. He’s available at maaher.znz@gmail.com or on LinkedIn as @Maaher Bhaloo. The opinions expressed here are the writer’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of The Chanzo. If you are interested in publishing in this space, please contact our editors at editor@thechanzo.com.
