Every few months, Amani Simba visits the marine port in Dar es Salaam to take delivery of five large shipping containers. Sent from England, each one typically contains about 150 scratched, dented, or lightly used refrigerators and freezers that will still fetch a good price in East Africa. The cargo and shipping cost roughly £60,000, which Simba, 28, slowly seeks to recoup from local buyers who pay with Tanzanian shillings. Yet as he prepares to place a new order, an inherent risk becomes evident: If the value of the shilling has risen against the pound in recent months, he’s in luck; if it has fallen, he may not have enough cash to pay for his next shipment. What then? He could simply place a smaller order—say, four shipping containers this time—but what if it happens again? With just a few bad rolls of the dice, Simba could be out of business for good.

Just three years ago, Elizabeth Njeri was scraping by as a subsistence farmer and part-time potter in Kenya’s central highlands. Then opportunity struck. As she was peddling her wares one day at a local market, a visiting trader placed a large order for earthenware cooking stoves. As more deals followed, Njeri and 11 other women in Kiriani village began gathering daily to mix clay, “throw” pots and stoves, and fire them in an open-flame kiln. Njeri, a wife and mother of three, marvels at her good fortune. “Now I have a cow, a water tank, and a kiln of my own,” she says with a radiant smile. “I have arrived.”

When Henry Kityo got into the fishing business eight years ago, his boat reliably pulled 40 kilograms of Nile perch daily from the fertile waters of Lake Victoria, Africa’s largest lake. Now he’s lucky if his crews bring in half as much. Kityo faults competitors who harvest immature fish, a practice that is decimating the Nile perch population. Smaller catches have driven one-third of the commercial processors out of business in the last year, imperiled the livelihoods of 200,000 fishermen, and jeopardized the daily sustenance of millions of Ugandan families. “We want to stop illegal fishing,” says Kityo, 33. “But we don’t know how.”

Hannah Nyokabi Kaniaru makes a living selling fruit at the City Market in Nairobi, Kenya. In neighboring Uganda, Thomas Wanyika Maembe spends his days promoting sustainable fishing practices on Lake Victoria. And in Tanzania, Chris Maina Peter splits his time, teaching law in Dar es Salaam and helping to oversee a legal aid center in Zanzibar. Not long ago, all three of them had a unique opportunity to share their thoughts on the East African Community (EAC), a resurgent effort to bring their countries closer together economically, socially, and politically.