Niamey - Niger — The Director of the Multilateral Surveillance of the ECOWAS Commission, Mr. Lassané Kaboré, has praised the economic performance achieved by most Community Member States in 2012.
At the opening of the 4th meeting of the National Coordination Committees/National economic policy Committees on the ECOWAS multilateral surveillance mechanism, Mr. Kaboré said that two Member States- Sierra Leone and Niger- achieved impressive double digit growth rates of 18.3 per cent and 11.6 per cent respectively. The other remarkable performances were 9. 5 per cent for Liberia, 8.6 per cent for Côte d’Ivoire and 8.1 per cent for Ghana with Nigeria and Burkina Faso recording 7.1per cent and 7 per cent respectively, exceeding the 7 per cent, threshold established by ECOWAS as the minimum required poverty reduction in the West African sub-region, Mr Kabore said. West Africa is projected to experience sustained growth rate of 6.9 per cent for 2012. Dr. Lassané Kaboré described the ECOWAS multilateral surveillance, as a continuous and ongoing monitoring process, noting that the monitoring and evaluation of the macroeconomic performance of Member States should contribute to ensuring a sound management of public funds.
In his remarks, the Permanent Secretary of the national economic policy Committee of Côte d’Ivoire, Mr. Tano Kobenan, whose country currently holds the chairmanship of ECOWAS, urged the participants to come up with proposals aimed at both strenghtening the mechanism and making recommendations towards the acceleration of macroeconomic convergence within ECOWAS Member States. « The highest authorities of our Community place a premium on macroeconomic convergence, given that economic convergence is a prerequisite for the creation of the future ECOWAS currency expected to be achieved by the year 2020 », Mr. Kobenan affirmed. This fourth meeting of the coordination Committees/national economic policy Committees on the ECOWAS multilateral surveillance mechanism is to consider the economic and financial situation reports of Member States for the first half of 2012. Each Member State delegation is therefore expected to make a presentation on the evolution of the economic and financial situation of the country for 2012 and the outlook for the future. The periodic reports prepared by the national coordination Committee form the basis for the preparation of ECOWAS macroeconomic convergence reports.
The participants will also discuss the status of the update of the database of the ECOWAS multilateral surveillance mechanism (ECOMAC) in the Member States and will take part in WAMA’s presentation on the methodology for the calculation of the real exchange rate. Representatives of regional institutions implicated in the implementation of the multilateral surveillance mechanism are also attending the meeting along officials from the ECOWAS and the West African Economic and Monetary Union (UEMOA) Commissions, the West African Monetary Agency (WAMA), the West African Monetary Institute (WAMI) and the ECOWAS Bank for Investment and Development (EBID). Participants are expected to make proposals for enhancing the effectiveness of the ECOWAS multilateral surveillance mechanism. The Niamey meeting is a follow-up to the 3rd meeting of the joint ECOWAS/UEMOA/WAMA/WAMI/EBID Secretariat, held from 13 to 16 November 2012 in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, on the ECOWAS multilateral surveillance mechanism.
