Fifth Comesa Annual Research Forum begins

Business Reporter
REGIONAL integration policy think-tanks, private sector, academic and development partner representatives from across Africa are meeting in Nairobi, Kenya for a week-long 5th Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) Annual Research Forum.

Anchored on the theme: “Harnessing the Demographic Dividend for Social Economic Transformation and Deep Regional Integration in Comesa through Academia-Industry Linkage”, the forum will focus on the digital economy in the context of the Tripartite and African Continental Free Trade Areas. This includes markets, industry, agriculture and infrastructure development.

According to the Comesa Secretariat, the gathering would also tackle other key thematic areas such as financing for commercialisation of research work; innovation and technology for social economic transformation; curriculum reforms to create entrepreneurial universities; and applied research and harnessing innovation.

“This theme has been motivated by the fact that Africa will make up a quarter of the world population by 2050 with an average 60 percent of the population being under 24 years according to the UN estimates,” said Dr Francis Mangeni, Comesa director of trade and customs.

Since 2014 Comesa has been organising annual research forums under the Africa Capacity Building (ACBF) funded project on enhancing capacity of the Comesa Secretariat to support economic and trade policy analysis and research. Riding on the success of the previous fora, a remarkable spike in submissions of research papers has been made by academicians and policy practitioners across the globe with 88 extended abstracts received, said the bloc. It said 11 of these will be presented to the forum and later published in the Comesa flagship publication on key Issues in regional Integration. The policy implications from the papers will be presented to the Comesa policy organs for consideration as a basis for the policy making.

“Member states have appreciated the critical role of the policy analysis and many of them have been implementing the policy recommendations on various papers presented in the previous research forums,” said Mr Benedict Musengele, Comesa senior research fellow.

The other benefit of the research forum is turning student research outputs into employment through commercialisation given the progress made in establishing the Comesa Virtual University. This is complemented by bringing together seasoned and budding researchers.

“The idea is to create links between universities, banks and industry,” Dr Mangeni, says. “This will enable universities to steer the work of their students into practical innovative research outputs which can be incubated and thereafter commercialised.”

Representatives from the Africa Development Bank, Economic Commission for Africa (ECA,) Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, Afrexim Bank, Comesa Competition Commission, ZEP-Re and Trade and Development Bank are set to attend.