Africa, BREAKING NEWS
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National planning experts from countries in the Economic Community of West African States holds a three-day meeting in Nigeria to harmonise their strategic framework for economic integration in the region
| By Anayo Ezugwu | Apr 11, 2016 @ 17:00 GMT |
THE Economic Community of West African States, ECOWAS Commission is meeting in Lagos, Nigeria, to deliberate with the national planning experts of member countries on how to deepen cooperation and economic integration of the region.
The three-day meeting is a follow-up to the 75 session of the council of ministers directive that the ECOWAS should link up with the various national development strategies.
Essien Abel Essien, director, strategic planning ECOWAS Commission, said participants at the meeting would discuss national development strategies of member states and agree on the modalities for integrating regional aspiration into national plans. The meeting is based on the directive of the council of ministers at its meeting in December last year that the preparation of the Community Strategic Framework, CSF, 2016-2020, which has been participatory should take into cognizance the views of civil society organisations and establish a linkage between the CSF and the National Development Plans of member states.
The director said that at the end of the meeting the participants would have established the needed linkage and he expected member states to present a-five-page document of their national development plans. “This will be discussed and we ensure that the aspirations of our member states are captured within the CSF. The CSF is a common framework from where each of the member states will develop their development programme from so that there will be consistence in developmental programmes. When we plan in a consistent manner, ECOWAS is targeting integration based on the belief it brings more development. When integration is deepened, then development is also deepened.
“From the last strategic plan that ended in 2015, there has been an evaluation over the strategic plan and I would say that we rate it 70 percent. Of course, you know during the implementation we had different challenges like security threats, Ebola and rest of them. So that also affected the implementation of plan. But going forward, the 2016-2020 plans we intend to improve on the implementations and that is why one of the discussions at this meeting will be the role of member states in the implementation of the CSF. We already have an implementation plan that we will also discuss and endorse.”
According to him, the private sector takes the signals from the community policies to drive its activities, citing the example of the West African monetary institute which established the bilateral convergence of our currencies. “We didn’t have to tell the private sector what do? The banks moved across the member states and that is why we have so many Nigerian banks all over the place. So what we need is an enabling environment for the private sector to carry out its activities,” Essien said.
Also, Tunde Lawal, who represented Nigeria at the meeting, said noted that although it’s coming several months after the inaugural section, he believed that it’s timely and useful especially as the meeting is coming on the heels of the development and implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals, SDGs, 2016 to 2030.
“The idea of developing a country’s strategic framework and ensuring that it’s well streamed in our national plans is very useful. I do believe that in the course of our three days meeting we will be able to learn from the experiences of member nations on how they have actually gone in their planning and how they intend to stream their plans. In the case of Nigeria, we taking are the needs of planning very serious which made us to plan for medium and long term and the government has also taken a step to ensure that the plans are lined with the annual budget. We recommend that member nations should adopt that model because it helps not only in ensuring that we plan but we allocate resources to facilitate effective implementation of these projects and programmes, he said.
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