Preliminary Results of Africa Regional Integration Index Presented to Ministers

1 April 2015
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United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (Addis Ababa)
press release

The African Development Bank the African Union Commission (AUC) and Economic Commission for Africa (ECA) presented preliminary data on the Africa Regional Integration Index to the 8th AU-ECA Conference of Ministers. The three institutions have collected data on 28 indicators for almost the entire continent. Data on almost 50 indicators have also been collected for the seven pilot countries whose national statistical focal points received training in November 2014.

H.E. Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma, AUC Chairperson, H.E. Carlos Lopes, Executive Secretary of ECA, and Ms. Geraldine Fraser-Moleketi, AfDB Vice-President and Special Envoy on Gender attended the presentation and welcomed the progress that the three institutions are making towards finalizing the index. Among the emerging results, there appeared to be a strong performance by Southern Africa in the area of trade integration; however, since the data is not comprehensive, this result could change.

Meanwhile, the three institutions continue to work on improving the data through training and statistical capacity-building. To this end, AfDB, AUC and ECA held a joint training from 23 to 27 March in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for 18 national statistical focal points from countries in Eastern and Southern Africa. The training equipped the focal points with a common understanding on the precise meaning of each indicator and possible data sources. The focal points also provided inputs for refining the metadata and questionnaires to be used in data collection. In all, the joint project team for the index has now trained 25 national statistical focal points on data collection for the index.

The Africa Regional Integration Index is the boldest attempt to date to collect data on the impacts of regional integration in Africa. It is funded by the AfDB's Africa Trade Fund, , ECA's African Trade Policy Centre and African Centre for Statistics and the AUC..

The next training workshop is scheduled for April 2015 in Tanzania and will bring together 10 focal points from RECs in Eastern and Southern Africa and Corridor Agencies.

The three institutions will provide a further update on the progress of the index and additional emerging results at the AU Summit of Heads of State and Government in South Africa in June 2015.

Jointly issued by AfDB-AUC-ECA

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