Specifically African regional economic communities i.e SADC, ECOWAS, ECCAS, EAC, COMESA, UMA. SADC is the specific region I would like to focus my paper on. I need some guidance on how to approach this question.
You may find useful the works by Ricardo Hausman (see this paper as example http://www.pnas.org/content/106/26/10570). I cannot be of any further help unfortunately.
It may be useful to follow the papers in "Regional Integration to Achieve Sustainable Development Asia-Pacific Business Forum 2017" although it concentrates on Asian region:
You may also follow GIZ & SADS project - a German integration project related with African Integration iniciatives "Regional Integration for Sustainable Development":