Abstract
The African Trade Policy Centre (ATPC) was established in June 2003. The Centre, based within the ECA Headquarters in Addis Ababa, was initially set-up with the financial support of the Canadian Government through the Canada Fund for Africa. The Centre has also received support from UNDP and the Government of Denmark.
The main objective of the Centre since its establishment has been to strengthen the human and institutional capacities of African Governments to formulate and implement sound trade policies and participate more effectively in trade negotiations at the bilateral, regional and multilateral levels. This is also to be supported and facilitated by the involvement of other relevant stakeholders such as the private sector, civil society, and academia in research, training, information dissemination and advisory services to build consensus and achieve inclusive outcomes.
ECA through ATPC continues to analyze trade-related issues through the lenses of the on-going Africa’s integration and transformation agenda, which essentially aims at attaining the following inter-related objectives:
In this perspective, ATPC still focuses on providing evidence-based analysis of the extent to which Africa’s export expansion has been accompanied by improvements in diversification, of the key obstacles faced by African countries in this regard, and of the policies that should be put in place to better leverage emerging opportunities. ATPC also focuses on disentangling the synergies and complementarities across Africa’s potential partnerships - at the global, regional and South-South level – shedding light on how regional integration and the “rise of the South” could be instrumental for Africa’s development objective.
The four broad themes under which the identified priority areas fall as indicated below:
To support intra-African trade, the presentation showcases potential markets on the African continent for a selected number of priority products of each country.