Photo Gallery

The scope of regional integration efforts in Africa is ambitious, thus creating important capacity needs in a vast number of areas. A simple response to the capacity needs of regional economic communities is to help them share experiences and put in common what they know or do best. The objectives of such experience sharing should be both focused and pragmatic. First, the focus should be to improve access to knowledge and good practice to inform policy making, but not beyond. There are for instance already important continental initiatives to provide high level policy coordination and strategic direction. Second, a knowledge sharing exercise should not be agenda‐driven but rather seek to investigate pragmatically for a given problem what have been proven solutions.
This Expert Meeting is being convened in order to define the contours and scope of the proposed Series of REC‐to‐REC Dialogues on Regional Trade Integration. The following broad themes could, for example, be addressed in forthcoming dialogues:

• Managing trade policy reform and implementation, best practices from REC secretariats;
• Meeting capacity building needs to implement trade reform;
• Monitoring and reviewing regional trade integration progress;
• Political economy of reform: the role of RECs;
• Negotiating liberalization in RECs;
• Linking liberalization agreement to implementation, and implementation to trade expansion;
• Regional public goods: lessons from power pools and other initiatives;
• Lessons from specific sectoral approaches in RECs (e.g. transport, standards, etc.);

The operationalization of this knowledge‐sharing exercise will also need to be discussed given the challenges posed by the limited sources of expertise, the costs of gathering individuals in meetings, and use of their time, and the need to maximize the outcome of such meetings, which will compete with many other official meetings.