The African Trade Policy Centre (ATPC) was created by the ECA in June 2003. The Centre, which is based in the ECA Headquarters in Addis Ababa, was set-up with the financial support of the Canadian Government through the Canada Fund for Africa. The Centre has also received support from UNDP and the Government of Denmark.

Some of the results achieved in the first phase of ATPC include:

• Enhanced African capacity to develop technical trade proposals. This arose from the improved participation, understanding and confidence of trained negotiators and increased understanding of ATPC research. This was attested to by several letters from the African WTO Group in Geneva and confirmed to the Evaluation Team.

• Increased understanding of the important role of trade in development. Active information dissemination, training and advisory services enabled all African countries and RECs to seek means of better integrating trade into their development strategies. This was attested to by participant evaluation following several ATPC activities including the Expert Group meeting on mainstreaming trade into National Development Strategies which took place in Casablanca, Morocco in May 2006.

• Increased coordination and harmonization of regional and sub-regional trade positions. Some examples of common trade positions which the ATPC helped to formulate include the Tunis Roadmap, the Cairo Declaration and Roadmap, and the Arusha Development Benchmarks.

• Increased credibility and influence - ATPC's contribution to trade-capacity building in Africa has been increasingly recognized. It hosted the 2006 Global Trade Analysis Project (GTAP) Global Trade Conference and has developed partnerships with other key stakeholders in the area of trade.

Rationale for Phase II

Africa's continued development challenge and its desire to benefit from increased trade opportunities underscores the need for focused and continued efforts to support these aspirations. African countries are undertaking efforts to participate in global and regional trade negotiations to ensure adopted trade rules promote development and to increase their global market share. They recognize that regional integration and domestic action to build supply capacities and attract foreign direct investment are key to their success. At the same time, the international community has provided support for Africa's efforts including through ATPC I, which is now coming to an end. Given the impact of ATPC I, increasing demand for its services and expectations of continued and broadened support, it is proposed to undertake a second phase of the ATPC Project (ATPC II).

The rationale for ATPC II includes:

• Promoting Regional Integration - Studies have shown that countries, which have successfully used the opportunities of international trade built their trading capacity on a regional base. A key challenge for the ATPC therefore is to continue to help African RECs and their member countries to develop policies and programmes to increase intra-African trade and bring concerns of various trade constituencies including gender, environment, business, and trade unions into the forefront of regional trade activities.

• Working in Collaboration with RECs and African Trade Organizations - Promoting regional integration is one of the major priorities of the African Union and the ECA. Phase II of ATPC will therefore need to pay attention to supporting the African regional integration agenda, which will involve working closely to strengthen institutional capacity in RECs and other regional institutions interested in trade capacity building such as TRAPCA, OATUU, and AERC to promote harmonization and coordination of regional and sub-regional trade policies

• Coping with Increasing Scope and Complexity - In view of the increasing number of regional and bilateral trade agreements (RBTAs) and the range of issues now included in trade negotiations, the ATPC needs to give more coverage to services, trade facilitation, intellectual property, sanitary and phyto-sanitary barriers, trade and environment, technical barriers to trade.

Vision for ATPC II

The vision envisaged for ATPC II is for it to help African countries to be better able to use trade as an engine of development. This is in recognition of the fact that Africa is the least developed continent and there is ample evidence from the emerging economies that utilising the advantages of international part is a key ingredient in the mix in the search for sustainable development. Moreover, the project is about empowering African countries to set their trade agenda instead of being reactive or having it imposed on them from outside.

The project will help African Regional Economic Communities and their member States to better integrate trade into their development strategies especially:

1) the identification of policies to diversify production, build export supply capacities and adjust to the economic impact of trade liberalization;

2) improve noticeably African negotiators' skills to better undertake and utilise impact analysis studies to obtain beneficial trade outcomes;

3) improve policy and regulatory capacities of the concerned RECs and their member states to meet the legislative and administrative requirements for complying with international trade rules and to benefit from their flexibilities; this would include helping to accelerate regional integration programmes especially those requiring increased coordination and harmonization at regional and sub-regional levels;

4) better integrate cross-cutting concerns relating to gender, environment and HIV/AIDS into trade policy.

Africa's regional economic communities have a key role to play in the development of the continent due to the political commitment of Africa's leaders to regional integration as well as the growing importance of regional and bilateral trade agreements. Given this reality as well as the fact that it is neither efficient nor cost effective for ATPC to be working directly with all 53 African countries, the strategic orientation of ATPC II will factor in and benefit from the existence of regional and sub-regional groupings like the AU and RECS. There would also be substantial economies of scale derived from working with and through RECs to deliver services to African countries and trade constituencies.

At the policy level, trade policies would need to be an integral and fully consistent part of national development strategies which in turn have to be regionally coherent to reflect Africa's political desire for regional integration to overcome the effects of its small fragmented economies. Similarly, African countries and their RECs have to be better able to negotiate trade agreements which form the rules of the international trading system. Additionally, it is also important that they have the capacity to translate the outcome of global and regional trade outcomes into consistent regional and national legislation.