Enhancing Regional integration:

ECCAS examines mid-term strategic plan

The MINEPAT, Louis-Paul Motaze reading his

opening address at the ECCAS workshop

A medium term strategic plan (MTSP) to enhance integration in the Central African region has been restituted and validated by stakeholders. The strategic plan was validated at a workshop in Yaounde on 5 and 6 July 2016.

                Presiding the two-day workshop, the Minister of Economy, Planning and Regional Development, Louis-Paul Motaze said member countries of the central African region need a medium term strategic plan as their road map and a barometer to evaluate the road covered and progress made in their drive towards true and meaningful integration.   

                Because a strategic plan is supposed to be a ‘visionary’ document, Minister Motaze exhorted participants at the two-day workshop to not hurriedly validate the document presented before them, but to carefully study it and make enriching amendments on it, so as to chart a better future for integration in Central Africa.

                The MTSP is a tool that guides the regional community in taking decisions and to determine the path to follow in the medium and long term, as well as consider the means to put in place to evaluate performance. It is a plan that focuses on results and thus should be flexible enough as to permit for regular reviewing and updating.   

                Prepared by ECCAS with financial support of about six billion francs cfa from the African Development Bank ADB, within the framework of its ‘Projetd’Appui au Renforcement des CapacitésInstitutionnelles de la CommunautéEconomique des Etats de l’AfriqueCentrale (PARCI-CEEAC)’, it is hoped that the MTSP will help ECCAS to refocus its activities to tie with the vision prescribed in 2013, by the heads of state and governments of ECCAS, with the view towards forging a more people-centred ECCAS that is in harmony with the AU’s 2063 Agenda and the UNO’s 2030 Agenda on the Millenum Development Goals MDG.

                Jointly organized by the General Secretariat of ECCAS with support from the MINEPAT and the ADB, the workshop was held at a time when the central African region is confronted by three major challenges: security, regional integration and development.

                It should be recalled that heads of state and governments of the Central African Region had engaged in October 2007 in Brazaville, Congo to make of ECCAS by 2035, a truly peaceful, prosperous, united and economically and politically viable region of Africa were people can circulate freely.