Ministerial Meeting on Trade, Regional Cooperation and Integration Opens with Calls to Action

Addis Ababa, 8 October 2007

In his opening statement to the 5th Meeting of the Committee on Trade, Regional Cooperation and Integration, on 9 October, Abdoulie Janneh, UN Under-Secretary-General and Executive Secretary of ECA, highlighted the fact “that Africa still faces tremendous challenges in advancing its integration agenda at all levels: national, subregional and continental”. In that context, Mr. Janneh, urged the meeting to focus on finding proposals in several key areas, including how to strengthen the capacity of the regional economic communities to implement their integration programmes at the national level.

For his part, Dr. Maxwell M. Mkwezalamba, the African Union Commissioner for Economic Affairs, noted that although there had been some progress on the integretion agenda, the continent “could have achieved even more after four decades of efforts”. He therefore called on African countries to now urgently move “from rhetoric to action”.

This sentiment was further stressed by Mr. Mekonnen Manyazewal, Ethiopia’s State Minister for Finance and Economic Development, who noted that progress to date on the African regional integration area had been materially insignificant. He thus urged the Committee to undertake “candid soul-searching” on why progress has not been made in key areas to date and identify concrete actions for follow-up.

ECA is mandated by General Assembly to set up a number of sectoral committees such as Committee on Trade and Regional Cooperation and Integration. These committees are expected to meet on a biennial basis to review problems and issues pertaining to their respective development sectors, formulate policies and strategies to address Africa's development challenges, and advise on sectoral work priorities to be reflected in the work programme of the Commission. The outcome of the meetings of the committees are to feed into the deliberations of the annual meetings of Commission's principal legislative organ, the Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development and its Committee of Experts.

The meeting runs until 10 October.

:: Statement by Abdoulie Janneh, ECA Executive Secretary

Issued by the ECA Information and Communication Service
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