Reflections on Africa's development :

Abstract

Since the inception of the Organization of Africa Unity (now the African Union), African leaders have focused on promoting regional cooperation and integration in Africa. They strongly believe that through the strategies, policies, programmes and activities of regional integration, the fifty-four fragmented economies on the continent could be integrated into one strong, robust, diversified and resilient economy, supported by a first-class trans-boundary infrastructure; highly educated, flexible and mobile workforce; highly mobile financial capital; sound health facilities and peace and security. They continue to stress that the spirit of ownership and self-belief of national development policies, which gives sufficient policy space to member States to design strategies that address their specific needs with a view to ending aid dependency over time, must underpin the process of achieving these lofty goals. This paper has explored the issues of policy space available to developing economies in the current era of globalization.The document is partitioned into seven sections. The 1st section focuses on the involvement of ECA in regional integration on the continent. A brief discussion on the historic landmarks of Africa’s integration process follows Section 2. Section 3 focuses on the regional economic communities. Section 4 addresses the need to rationalize the RECs on the continent. Section 5 provides discussions on the continent’s infrastructure agenda.