Business
Central Africa working to revive stalled integration process
Central Africa, one of the regions that has recorded the slowest progress in regional integration despite huge natural resources, is seeking to forge a harmonized regional identity.
Finance and integration ministers of member countries of the region’s trade blocs meeting in Cameroon’s capital Yaoundé last week said they would fast-track their integration process.
Integration programs in Central Africa have stumbled along because of political, economic, institutional and financial obstacles caused by overlapping memberships to the region’s two blocs.
The seven-member Central African Economic and Monetary Community and the 11-member Economic Community of Central African States both claim to be seeking to eliminate the problem of small-sized national markets, and to open up and to create a larger area capable of facing market competition resulting from globalization, however both groupings seem to have so far missed their mark.
Central Africa has the lowest infrastructure network on the continent, especially in transport and energy which impacts negatively on the region’s productive capacity and trade.
According to figures released by the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, trade within the Central African Economic and Monetary Community in 2006 represented only between 0.5 percent and 1 percent of the region’s total exchanges.
This is a sharp contrast, with intra-community trade in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) which accounted for 5 percent of exchanges that same year.
