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Comesa concludes regional integration plan

Business
THE Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) medium term strategic plan, which has been concluded, will entrench trade facilitation, market integration, infrastructure development and industrialisation covering small-to-medium enterprises.

THE Common Market of Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) medium term strategic plan, which has been concluded, will entrench trade facilitation, market integration, infrastructure development and industrialisation covering small-to-medium enterprises.

BY VICTORIA MTOMBA

Comesa secretary-general, Sindiso Ngwenya, said the strategic plan was a useful tool to engage strategic partners in the pursuit of regional integration to marshal financial and non-financial resources to build on successes and override the prevailing challenges.

“Currently, over 80% of the Comesa programmes are funded by co-operating partners. This makes the sustainability of programmes under such funding arrangements difficult,” he said.

Addressing 10 of the 19-member States that attended the review meeting, Ngwenya said countries should take ownership of the strategy to enable it to contribute to structural transformation of their economies.

“It is a responsibility of member states to domesticate the strategic plan through alignment with their national development plans and take on ownership of the implementation process,” he said.

On market integration, he said the challenges towards attaining the seamless flow of goods, free movement of persons, capital and other objectives are still daunting.

“Intra-regional trade remains low — below 10%, transaction costs are still very high and huge obstacles exist to the free movement of goods, capital, investments and people in form of non-tariff and technical barriers to trade,” Ngwenya said.

He lamented that immigration laws and policies in many countries are still harsh and discriminatory. Yet, the free movement of citizens remains a recurrent theme in policy discourse for the desired goals, as stated in the strategy, for achieving the common market.

After the current review, the 2016-2020 strategic plan will be presented to the council of ministers meeting in October this year for adoption and implementation.

The development of the new strategy used a wide consultative approach, with key stakeholders internally and externally. Consultations were undertaken at different levels, including the African Union Commission under Agenda 2063, Centre for the Sustainable Development Goals, as well as with other regional economic communities.