African countries urged to focus on developing small enterprises

Intra-regional trade in the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA) has increased dramatically but a lot needs to be done to achieve more with focus on small, medium and micro enterprises (SMEs), noted Officials.

Speaking at the 34th session of the Council of Ministers of COMESA on Thursday in Ethiopia's capital Addis Ababa, the officials of the sub-region also underlined the need to ensure value addition of products in member countries for more intra- COMESA trade and more job opportunities.

"The intra-COMESA trade is growing very big, but we need to do more with focus on SMEs," said Sindiso Ngwenya, COMESA Secretary General.

Stating that the COMESA integration programs are bearing positive results, Debretsion Gebremichael, Ethiopia's minister of communications and information technology, underlined the need for the sub-region to value additions of products towards more job opportunities and increased revenues of exports.

"Our regional integration programs are bearing positive results. For instance, in the areas of trade development, we move from preferential trade arrangements to a full-fledged free-trade area, " said Debretsion.

With 19 member states, COMESA's intra-trade grew from 8 billion U.S. dollars to 22 billion dollars between the years 2004 and 2014.

The Council of Ministers is expected to deliberate on the recommendations and action plans made by the inter-governmental committee meeting convened on March 22-24 to address key issues such as cross border economic infrastructure, industrialization, institutional matters, policy and regulations, trade facilitation and COMESA programmes in general.

Heads of Sates of COMESA, the East African Community (EAC), and the Southern Africa Development Community (SADC), have decided to establish a single tripartite free trade area (FTA) covering 26 countries.

The tripartite FTA will be launched in June 2015 in Egypt bringing together a combined population of 625 million people and gross domestic product of 1.2 trillion dollars and accounting for 58 percent of Africa's gross domestic product, according to COMESA.

The Tripartite FTA will be the launch pad for the Continental Free Trade Area (CFTA) in 2017 under the auspices of the African Union, said COMESA.