ATPC Holds First Stakeholder Meeting

By Andrew Allimadi, Communication Officer,TRID, ECA
10 May 2004

The African Trade Policy Centre (ATPC) held its first stakeholder meeting in Tunis, Tunisia on 30 April 2004. The aim of the meeting was to bring together several international agencies working on trade issues in Africa, national and sub-regional users of trade support services, and donor agencies to review activities of the Centre and discuss synergies between various programmes. The meeting gave all stakeholders the opportunity to identify their niche and areas of cooperation between the various actors.

In his opening address to the meeting, Mr. Hakim Ben Hammouda, the director of TRID, which is host to ATPC at its offices in Addis Ababa, said ECA has given strong attention to trade activities for Africa since its creation. He said the establishment of the World Trade Organization (WTO) has altered the international negotiations landscape, which gives African countries the opportunity to end their marginalization in the international arena and make their voices heard. He said the creation of ATPC has increased the assistance available to Africa, and added that collaboration between all agencies working on trade is essential in order to maximize the effectiveness of the limited resources available.

Patrick Osakwe informed the meeting on the rationale for ATPC and of its recent activities, which include a soon to be published study on the impact of OECD agricultural subsidies on African countries; and a training workshop on Agriculture for African officials, which ran from the 26 – 29 April. He identified the main weaknesses of African countries in participating in international trade as being a lack of capacity to formulate coherent trade polices, lack of sound information on which to base decisions, and the lack of ability to carry out research and analyses.

Representatives from African countries and sub-regional organizations made interventions praising the work of ATPC and by-and-large, calling for more. The representative from Kenya, Mr Elijah Manyara, said: “we welcome the establishment of ATPC” and it’s proposed areas of activity, which will address critical capacity gaps on the continent. Mr Jamel Boujdaria, the representative of UMA, said his organization would soon seek the support of ATPC to organize seminars to analyse the dangers faced by UMA countries form the impending end of the multi-fibre agreement. Representatives from Tunisia and the Africa Geneva Group also made presentations at the meeting. Laura Griggs from CIDA, which provided the C$5million seed funding to establish ATPC, said she was pleased with the discussion. She added that she attended the final day of the ATPC training workshop on Agriculture and noted the “positive comments” made by participants. She added that she would like the ATPC’s programme of activities to be demand driven and respond to requests from users.

Other participants who made presentations of their work and possible areas of collaboration include UNCTAD, WTO, ITC, UNDP, OECD, CIDA, DFID and ILEAP. A full report of the meeting will be available on the TRID web site later this week.