APRM partners AfCFTA secretariat to reposition intra-Africa trade

Chief Executive Officer of the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) says the institution is ready to deploy its expertise in the area of trade as it seeks to supervise and monitor the compliance of state parties to the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).

The APRM boss said this is the first time APRM will be considering the area of trade on the continent that has been operating along with the themes of social-economic development, political, corporate, and economic governance.

“APRM is a known governance mechanism for Africa but essentially the tools that we use are mostly monitoring and evaluation. Our specialty is in looking at the state of compliance of member states to their regional instruments and commitments.

The AfCFTA is a treaty with all its binding requirements on its state parties and so our role will be to go to these states and find out how they comply with the provisions in the treaty,” he told Single African Market.

Although the APRM has been operating largely on the four thematic areas of political and economic governance, socio-economic development, and corporate governance, Prof. Maloka said it has a new targeted review tool methodology that will be deployed for trade-related issues.

“This is our core business, we only have to customize and where we have gaps, we will be able to bring experts. We already have experts who deal in trade so we’ll be able to enrich our tools since the architecture is already in place,” he added.

The APRM has already signed an MoU with the AfCFTA Secretariat to collaborate on the implementation of mandates of the two African Union Institutions, including harmonizing efforts in line with policies and practices that conform with the agreed political, economic, and corporate governance values, codes, and standards, and to achieve mutually agreed objectives.

Secretary-General of the AfCFTA Secretariat, Wamkele Mene, speaking at the signing event, said: “With this MoU, the Secretariat and the APRM Continental Secretariat agree to collaborate in the various areas that are set out in pursuit of our common objectives and undertakings and we shall be guided by the core values that are deeply held by our two institutions.

The African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) is a specialized agency of the African Union (AU), initiated in 2002 and established in 2003 by the African Union to serve as a tool for sharing experiences, reinforcing best practices, identifying deficiencies, and assessing capacity-building needs to foster policies, standards and practices that lead to political stability, high economic growth, sustainable development, and accelerated sub-regional and continental economic integration.