Supply Capacity - UNECA
Upon request, ECA provides training for African enterprises and policymakers for identifying export opportunities and on how to access export markets. For example, ECA is currently working with the Ghana National Chamber of Commerce to support the capacity of Ghanaian enterprises to work with the ECOWAS Common External Tariff and make the most of opportunities afforded by the African Continental Free Trade area. ECA is also working with the African Organization for Standardization (ARSO) to share a compendium of information on agricultural standards in use in Africa.
In addition, ECA is working on building member states’ capacities to improve their renewable energy generation capacity and energy accessibility, which in turn will support the supply capacity of their firms. On top of its existing work in this area, ECA can provide support to individual member States or African regions upon request.
ECA is also working on a research paper on the development of pharmaceutical value chains in Africa, in collaboration with the Centre for Trade Policy and Law at Carleton University.
ECA has worked with a number of African countries towards developing African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) National Utilization Strategies and provides assistance to member states upon request. It also assisted Ethiopia in 2015 towards the development of a National African Growth and Opportunity Act Centre to assist businesses to take advantage of the preferences granted under the Act.
To underscore Africa's agenda for food security, industrialization and sustainable development, ECA co-organized the African Economic Conference 2016 on the theme “Feeding Africa: Towards Agro-Allied Industrialization for Inclusive Growth” in Abuja, Nigeria December 5-7, 2016 to offer a unique avenue for researchers, policymakers and development practitioners from Africa and elsewhere to debate and build knowledge on how to leverage agro-industrialization for feeding Africa, promoting inclusive growth and agro-led structural transformation in Africa.
Relatedly, ECA organized in December 2016, in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, a symposium on “Implementing Agro-Industrialization and Regional Value Chains for Africa’s Agricultural Transformation”, where were presented 16 regional value chain studies produced by ECA covering all African sub-regions.
Following the SADC industrialization strategy and the reaffirmation of the use of industrial development for poverty alleviation, SADC requested support from ECA for the development of an ICT Observatory and an action plan for the implementation of the industrialization strategy.
The SADC ICT Observatory is expected to provide reliable, accurate, consistent and up-to-date information in different areas that address the challenge of inadequate data and unsuitable indicators for Member States. Furthermore, the Observatory is expected to facilitate the collection and dissemination of ICT indicators, for the measurement of growth, benchmarking, and for preparing reports, thus enabling key stakeholders such as investors, businesses, citizens and governments to access accurate information for decision making as part of the economic transformation and industrial development. The observatory will support sub-regional trade, industrialization and intelligence-gathering in SADC.