The African Union is set to launch a common electronic passport that would grant visa-free travel to all of its 54 member-states, a move that hits at the organization's long-running goal of more closely linking nations from across the continent.

The passport will first be issued to heads of state and senior officials at the AU's summit in Kigali, Rwanda, later this month, with the Union saying it aims to provide passports to all African citizens by 2020.

But the AU's efforts to create a common passport, which observers say is in line with the organization's mission dating back to its earlier iteration as the Organization of African Unity, comes as the European Union faces growing fissures in the wake of Britain's landmark vote to leave.

While Britain's vote came amid campaigns that appealed to economic concerns, a sense of national sovereignty and what some say were racially-tinged anti-immigrant sentiments, for the AU nations, many of them with a relatively recent colonial past, a common passport appeals to an shared ideal of Pan-Africanism.