SAATM : What’s Delaying the Dream of Unified Airspace?
At the sidelines of the 81st IATA Annual General Meeting (AGM) held in New Delhi from June 1 to 2, 2025, Kamil Al-Awadhi, IATA’s Regional Vice President for Africa and the Middle East, delivered a blunt diagnosis: Africa’s aviation sector remains trapped by structural barriers—despite political declarations of open skies. At the heart of the problem is the slow and uneven implementation of the Single African Air Transport Market (SAATM), an African Union initiative launched in 2018 to liberalize the continent’s airspace.
