The development of trans-African highways and associated road infrastructure is aimed at combating poverty in Africa by increasing interstate and domestic trade, revitalizing small and medium-sized businesses, reducing prices for goods and improving living conditions.

On 1 July 1971 Robert K. A. Gardiner, the Executive Secretary of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA), established the Trans-African Highway Bureau to oversee the development of a continental road network.

Wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo set back road infrastructure in that country by decades and cut the principal route between East and West Africa.

In recent years, security considerations have restricted road travel in the southern parts of Morocco, Algeria, Libya and Egypt as well as in northern Chad and much of Sudan.

The need to reduce delays caused by highway checkpoints and border controls or to ease travel restrictions has also been identified, but so far solutions have not been forthcoming.

The network as planned reaches all the continental African nations except Burundi, Eritrea, Eswatini, Somalia, Equatorial Guinea (Rio Muni), Lesotho, Malawi, Rwanda and South Sudan.

Further north in Cameroon and Chad, hilly terrain or plains prone to flooding have restricted the development of local paved road networks.