The fourth panel at the African MRO Conference moved the discussion beyond whether Africa has maintenance capability and confronted a more consequential question: why does a continent with certified MRO capacity still struggle to use that capacity across its own borders?
The continent already has EASA- and FAA-certified maintenance organisations, trained personnel and recognised facilities. The real barrier is that this capability remains constrained within fragmented national systems. As a result, Africa is still not operating as a single aviation maintenance market.
The MRO discussion in Africa has often focused on building capacity. This panel argued that at least part of that capacity already exists. The issue is that it cannot move, scale or be accessed efficiently across the continent because certification, personnel recognition, customs processes and oversight frameworks remain uneven and nationally bound.
In practice, this means a certified African MRO may still face delays, repeat approvals and operational restrictions when serving another African market. The commercial outcome is underutilised capacity in one region and unmet demand in another.
The central question is therefore not whether African MROs can perform the work, but whether African states, regulators and continental institutions are prepared to enable that capability to operate across borders with the speed and predictability required by airline operations.
Each state’s Civil Aviation Authority maintains its own processes, levels of implementation and thresholds of trust. This creates a situation in which maintenance approvals, engineer licences and released components may be accepted in one jurisdiction but still face scrutiny, delay or duplication in another. For MRO providers, this introduces friction in precisely the areas where time is most critical, particularly for Aircraft on Ground (AOG) support, heavy maintenance planning and technical personnel deployment.
When an African MRO deploys engineers into another country, those engineers may still require local validation despite already holding qualifications from an approved organisation. When parts move between maintenance points, customs and logistics bottlenecks can add days or weeks to processes that should be measured in hours. In both cases, the issue is not the absence of skill or certification, but the absence of seamless mutual recognition.
The panel highlighted a wide variation in International Civil Aviation Organization Effective Implementation (EI) scores across African states, ranging from above 90 percent to below 10 percent. This disparity creates a structural trust deficit across the continent. Even where some countries demonstrate strong oversight systems and globally credible MRO capability, the lack of harmonised implementation makes mutual recognition difficult to establish. As a result, African operators often look outside the continent for maintenance certainty, even when technical capability exists locally.
In practical terms, an Embraer 145-licensed engineer in Namibia should be able to work on the same aircraft type in Senegal without unnecessary duplication of approvals.
Comparison with Latin America provided a useful context. The region was described as having comparable levels of technical maturity but significantly greater industrial scale. Its progress reflects a long-term process of regulatory alignment based on globally accepted reference frameworks, particularly FAA and EASA standards. While Latin America has not resolved all challenges, it is establishing a mechanism that enables multiple states to operate with greater commonality and reduced duplication.
The example of the East African Community through the Civil Aviation Safety and Security Oversight Agency (CASSOA) was cited, where a common examination system enables maintenance engineers to follow a single certification pathway recognised across multiple states. This supports trust between authorities and demonstrates how regional oversight structures can facilitate harmonisation. Regional Safety Oversight Organisations have a role to play in bringing lower-performing states up to acceptable implementation levels.
The panel also linked MRO integration to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), positioning the issue within the broader political economy of continental integration. Maintenance services, technical labour and aviation components are not isolated from trade policy.
Under the AfCFTA, Mutual Recognition Agreements are recognised under the Trade in Services Protocol, specifically Article 10, and the AfCFTA Secretariat has already begun developing such agreements, creating a practical pathway for implementation.
The African Civil Aviation Commission (AFCAC), in collaboration with member states, has already introduced a working paper on mutual recognition of maintenance organisations. This proposes the establishment of Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs) to address regulatory and compliance barriers at a continental level.
This opens the possibility of launching pilot MRO corridors aligned with AFCAC’s framework. Initial participants could include major aviation hubs such as Ethiopia, Kenya, South Africa and Egypt, focusing first on professional services such as maintenance engineering.
Importantly, this does not require full alignment across all 54 national regulatory systems. The focus can instead remain on the two dominant technical standards, FAA and EASA, which underpin most aircraft operating on the continent. If these are adopted as the primary benchmarks for mutual recognition, much of the existing fragmentation could be addressed.
A single African maintenance market would not only improve the movement of aircraft and components, but also enable more efficient deployment of skills and labour. Mutual recognition would therefore extend beyond regulation into a broader economic and industrial function.
The discussion also raised the issue of protectionism. Regulatory fragmentation is not solely technical; it can reflect institutional caution, national interest and limited willingness to rely on external capacity. This has practical consequences. Countries may continue investing in parallel domestic capability without sufficient scale or demand, while stronger African MRO providers remain underutilised. The result is duplication of effort and continued export of maintenance value.
