Integrating African Markets; Africa’s Way Forward

Last year, I had the pleasure of attending the Biannual Research Workshop hosted by the African Economic Research Consortium (AERC) in Nairobi, Kenya. The theme of this workshop was “Integrating African Markets: The way forward” going by the hashtag #AfricanIntegration. Many paper presentations were made notably by Prof. Akpon H. E. Ekpo, Prof. Temesgen, Dr. Karingi and Prof. Hoekmans who made a paper presentation entitled “Policy Dimensions of reducing African Trade Costs” just to mention a few, as it was about a four-day workshop and many other presentations were made.

No man is an Island, a famous saying to suggest that no man or rather no economy can be fully self-sufficient, this is evident from the various economic integrations and unions all over the globe like the European Union, SADC, ECOWAS, EAC, COMESA and so forth. Empirical data suggests that when economies or rather countries cooperate, the progress of individual economies or country also grows as well the overall economy of the economies or countries combined. It’s for this reason that many economic integrations are still alive and strong since the 50’s 0r 60’s and perhaps much more are yet to come. Some are simply been revisited like the EU after the rather shocking BREXIT (United Kingdom’s decision to leave the European Union) and of course the East Africa Community which is still holding negotiations to finalize the partnership of the east African nations such as incorporating the new nation of South Sudan.

It’s no new scenario that economic partnerships do pose a lot of challenges but at the same time, the benefits of integrating far outweigh the costs and this is the direction that African economies should be taking if the continent is to reach middle-income status within the next 50 years.