* Five Horn of Africa countries are validating a regional trade facilitation roadmap aimed at improving cross-border trade.
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* The roadmap takes a bottom-up approach, building regional solutions around practical challenges identified through national consultations.
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* Implementation will be crucial, as the initiative seeks to create a more connected trade system that enables the region to function as a single economic space.
High-ranking officials from the ministries of trade and finance from Djibouti, Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, and South Sudan are meeting in Nairobi today, 14 August, to discuss and validate the second edition of a regional trade facilitation roadmap. The roadmap is designed to address one of the Horn of Africa’s most persistent obstacles to economic integration: the difficulty of moving goods efficiently across borders.
The conference, which began yesterday, is coordinated by Liban Obsiye, Head of the Horn of Africa Initiative (HoAI) Secretariat, and the Nairobi branch of German development bank KfW. It focuses on a cycle of national consultations conducted across the five countries, bringing together public institutions and private-sector stakeholders.
Rather than imposing a uniform blueprint from the outside, the roadmap has sought to build a regional framework from the constraints and practical realities identified within each country.
This makes the approach unusual in the African integration landscape. Instead of following the traditional top-down pathway, in which regional commitments are negotiated first, and implementation is expected to follow, the HoAI is pursuing a bottom-up pathway, starting with problems identified on the ground and building regional solutions around them.
