Douala, 2 April 2018 (ECA – www.uneca.org/sro-ca) - Members of the Committee on Trade, Customs and Immigration of the Economic Community of Central Africa States (ECCAS) have urged the Secretariat of the 11-nation Community to intensify its efforts at mobilizing member States to do their due diligence for the ECCAS Free Trade Area (ECCAS FTA) to become effective.
Yaounde, 27 March 2018 (ECA – www.uneca.org/sro-ca) – By 2020, African countries will fully exploit mobile devices and the internet to conduct demographic and housing censuses more speedily and cost effectively, hence enhancing decision making for the achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).
When the exploitation of oil and gas began in Equatorial Guinea from the early 1990’s, the country quickly became Africa’s fastest economically growing nation, recording unprecedented growth rates of over 27% between 1993 and 2012 and enjoying the highest GDP per capita not only in central Africa but in the whole continent.
Yaounde, 26 Feb. 2018 (ECA) –The Douala Consensus, a clarion call made in September 2017 for the rapid diversification and industrialization of economies of countries across Central Africa, by ECA experts and over a hundred high-level planners and other stakeholders of the sub-region, is producing spinoffs.
Yaounde, 23 Feb. 2018 (ECA) – Several mid and senior level officials serving across a broad range of ministerial departments in Cameroon have been reviewing their approach in domesticating the UN’s Agenda 2030 and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 – two complementary international development frameworks, thanks to new knowledge and perspectives acquired from a recent workshop co-organized by the Government of Cameroon and the UN Economic Commission for Africa (ECA).
The recent slump in commodity prices, most notably those of oil and related products, has caused fiscal and current account deficits in Central Africa since 2014. Meanwhile, structural transformation has been slowed down on all of its components.