The United Nations (UN) Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) and the African Union Commission (AUC) have jointly challenged the African countries to seek enhance intra-trade to hedge against external shocks occasioned by current global economic slowdown.
The two bodies emphasised on strengthening regional integration, lowering cost of trade, and making a strong commitment to the continental free trade area that is under negotiation.
“Current global economic slowdown underscores the need for Africa to also figure out how it could extract more value from its global trade and other economic activities, in light of its continued exportation of commodities”, Abdalla Hamdok, deputy executive secretary and chief economist, UN ECA, said yesterday at a conference in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
He noted that Africa’s growth rate has declined slightly from 3.9 percent in 2014 to 3.7 percent in 2015 following the slowdown in the global economy, adding that the continent’s economic growth is mainly associated with increased exploitation of non-renewable natural resources with minimal value addition and employment generation.
However, he said Africa’s growth has continued to rank as the second fastest after a East and South Asia over the decade, driven by domestic demand and continued investment, particularly on infrastructure projects.
Meanwhile, Nigerian delegates could not be seen at the first day of the ninth joint annual meetings of the African Union Specialised Technical Committee on finance, monetary affairs, economic planning and integration and the Economic Commission for Africa conference of African ministers of finance, planning and economic development.
Speaking at the conference, Anthony Maruping, commissioner for economic affairs, AUC, said the Specialised technical committee is expected to bless the integrated and coherent approach to implementation, monitoring and evaluation of agenda 2063 and Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and issue of a single periodic progress report covering performance on both agenda 2063 and SDGs at a time.
He disclosed that issues such as progress on the regional integration front in Africa, assessing the status of statistics improvement in Africa, social development considerations and several pertinent sub-topics will be discussed over the next six days.
In his remarks, Ahmed Shide, state minister of finance and economic cooperation of the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, said notwithstanding the positive performance of the continent, poverty is still widespread, especially among the rural communities.
He advised that African countries must explore bold and transformative options to make development much more inclusive and sustainable in the new development era.
