The Economic Commission for Africa and the African Union Commission are collaborating on an index, aimed at tracking progress in African regional integration and compare progress across countries. The index will measure integration in a broad range of areas, such as free movement of persons, trade, statistics, political and governance, industry, investment, infrastructure, energy, culture and macroeconomic policy convergence in all African countries.
At the end of the joint ECA-AU March 2014 Conference of African Ministers of Finance, Planning and Economic Development a resolution was passed, supporting the index and urging governments to cooperate on the project.
"With the list of indicators and the methodology for computing the index finalised, work is now ongoing on the data collection phase," states Stephen Karingi, Director, Regional Integration Division at the ECA.
"ECA and AUC will collect data in selected Regional Economic Communities (RECs) and Governments and combine that with the data already held in-house by the two institutions," he adds.
The questionnaires will be distributed to all Governments. In addition, the work will also look at the performance in regional integration of all eight Regional Economic Communities (RECs) that have been recognized by the AU.
"When the index is ready, it will provide the Continent with a mechanism to track progress in regional integration. We will be able to see which countries are having the most success at integrating with the rest of Africa and see which policies are the most successful in this regard," says Karingi.
