Integrating East Africa

East Africa is currently confronted with the conundrum of change to adapt to its rapidly growing population and at the same time forge ties with emerging powers like China, India and Brazil. To leverage its weak strength, integration has been the most potent option for it; if it has to compete with other bigger economies to attract partnerships with these emerging economies. Pursuing this trajectory of integration is fraught with problems stemming from leadership. This text conducts a survey of the current state of the East African Community and moves ahead to closely investigate challenges that fall in its way. East Africa's security architecture is weakened by an unstable Horn of Africa and the resultant effect of small weapons proliferation. It is established that effective monitoring of conflict and shoring up of central governments capacity to deal with internal sources of weakness will have a reverberating effect in the region. Education and culture have to be creatively contrived to be complementary to integration effort.