Top 5 countries within the East African Community with the highest real GDP growth

This good trend ranks the EAC among Africa’s fastest-growing regional blocs, thanks to increasing intra-regional trade, infrastructure investment, and a recovery in important sectors including agriculture, services, and manufacturing.

The expansion comes as many regions throughout the world are dealing with inflation, mounting debt, and supply chain problems.

The EAC’s 5.4% growth rate reflects coordinated economic policies, improvements in cross-border trade facilitation, and continued implementation of the EAC Common Market Protocol.

The East African Community (EAC) is a regional intergovernmental organization of seven partner countries: Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, South Sudan, Tanzania, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Established with the goal of promoting economic, political, and social integration, the EAC represents a market of more than 300 million people and is growing in strategic importance both within Africa and beyond.

The EAC has emerged as Africa’s integration lighthouse, achieving significant strides in policy harmonization, non-tariff obstacles elimination, and investor attraction.

Despite these challenges, the region has shown that it can remain persistent in developing its economy collectively.

This figure according to the Economic Survey report by the Kenyan National Bureau of Statistics, showed that the region’s growth rate has gone from 4.7% to 5.4% considering the economic activities of months after October (Q4 2024).

The countries that contributed most to the East African Community’s growth performance between Q1 and Q3 were Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda. Kenya’s economy alone is projected to rise to 5% in 2024 and 5.1% in 2025–2026.

However, given the latest revision in the overall figure, below are the 5 countries in the sub-region with the highest real GDP growth in 2024.