The African Development Fund, the concessional arm of the African Development Bank Group, has approved a $3.48 million grant to finance impact assessments on the Africa Union's Accelerated Industrial Development for Africa (AIDA) framework and to support the implementation of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) in the transition economies of Cameroon, Chad, Comoros, Madagascar and Togo.
The grant, approved by the Fund's Board of Directors on July 13, will help strengthen the design of evidence-based, inclusive, and climate-sensitive industrial and trade policies in the five countries. It will address persistent gaps in institutional capacity, data quality, and policy coordination which continue to hinder industrialization efforts and the effective implementation of trade policies across the beneficiary countries.
"National institutions often lack sufficient access to reliable, disaggregated, and climate-relevant data, while fragmented coordination mechanismsh limit their ability to design coherent, inclusive, and evidence-based policies," said Memory Dube, the project team leader at the African Development Bank Group. "The project responds to these challenges by providing a standardised and analytically robust methodology, tailored to national realities, to assess industrial and trade dynamics. It will also strengthen the technical capacity of government experts and support the institutional mechanisms needed to produce, analyse, and utilize new evidence."
The project will deliver training tailored to each national context, multilingual learning materials, practical exercises in data collection and validation, and on-the-ground technical support. It will also promote shared methodologies for developing, monitoring, and evaluating public policies, while supporting the integration of indicators on gender equality, climate change, and small and medium-sized enterprises into national monitoring and evaluation systems.
Beneficiaries include public officials, trade analysts, academics, government ministries, development agencies and partners, regional economic communities, and businesses led by women and young people.
The project will be implemented by the African Union Development Agency - New Partnership for Africa's Development (AUDA-NEPAD), in collaboration with national institutions and regional stakeholders. It builds on earlier work to develop and pilot the AfCFTA/AIDA impact Assessment Guide and will support its wider application in countries in transition.
