The East African Business Council (EABC) has signed an agreement with the East African Manufacturers Business Membership Organisations, a move that is expected strengthen efforts aimed at solving challenges facing industrialists in the region.

According to Robert Bayigamba, the chairman Rwanda Manufacturers Association, the partnership will help drive the regional industrialisation agenda, ensuring that EAC industrialisation strategy and policy are properly developed and implemented.

He said the memorandum of understanding signed recently will help put in place a systematic approach to address the numerous challenges affecting the performance of the manufacturing sector in the region.

Bayigamba said the two-year deal will also boost the potential of the sector and provide a platform through which stakeholders can address challenges affecting producers collectively.

He noted that all member states, including Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Kenya and Tanzania, have already agreed to support the deal, a big step that could augment inter-regional and intra-Africa trade.

According to the agreement, the two organisations will establish an EAC manufacturers’ network that will work under the EABC to advocate for the interests of manufacturers.

Bayigamba said combining efforts as manufacturers is important to grow the sector, arguing that this will also make it easy to solve the challenges regional industrialists face. 

Andrew Luzze, the EABC executive director, said the deal will foster linkages between EABC and businesses in individual countries across the region.

"We appreciate this move…we expect the network to strengthen EABC through consensus building and sharing of knowledge on challenges regional manufacturers face,” Luzze said.

Under the MOU, the two organisations also committed to dealing with illicit trade and pushing for the review of the EAC common external common tariff. They will also address issues of harmonisation of standards, and internal taxes, including value added tax and excise duty.

Betty Maina, the chief executive of the Kenya Association of Manufacturers, said it is good regional industrialists have agreed to work together to increase competitiveness of the region rather than compete against each other. "This way, we will jointly promote consumption of homemade products and consolidate the market,” she said.

Lawrence Oketcho, the head of policy and advocacy at the Uganda Manufacturers Association, said the partnership gives them more bargaining power while negotiating with regional governments on industry-related matters.

Dr. Samuel Nyantahe, the chairman of the Confederation of Tanzania Industries, said the partnership will make it easy to monitor national and regional developments, especially issues that impact the manufacturing sector in the EAC.

Intra-African trade stands at around 10 per cent according to the African Union Action plan for boosting intra-Africa trade done in 2013.

This means that African nations have been unable to fully harness the synergies and complementarities of their economies and take full advantage of the economies of scale and other benefits, such as income and employment generation, that greater market integration would have provided, it adds. It notes that there are cases where products and services could have been sourced competitively from other African countries but were procured from outside the continent.