Civil Society urged on EAC Common Market protocol

The Secretary General of the East African Community, Dr. Richard Sezibera, has said that unless all parties are involved in implementing the common market protocol, the community will not realise its desired objectives.While opening the forum of civil society organisations and the private sector yesterday, Sezibera said that Common Market’s realisation would take a lot of hard work from all stakeholders in order to achieve the intended results and reap envisioned mutual benefits. The forum was convened to evaluate the implementation of the two-year-old common market protocol.In order to speed up the common market’s operationalisation, he said Partner States would set up Implementation Committees and urged all stakeholders to render full support to them.He noted that one of the reasons which led to the collapse of the former EAC, was lack of participation of the civil society and private sector.Sezibera expressed dissatisfaction over the slow involvement of women in the economic and leadership positions and called for the need to reverse the trend. “We need more women in leadership positions involved in our activities,” he said, underlining that the region’s gender policy called for improvement.However though the protocol was envisaged to play a significant role in the economic development of the region, it still faces different hurdles like non-tariff barriers in the member countries. The barriers especially the road blocks and corruption are some of the challenges hindering the smooth flow of goods and services in the region.

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Civil Society urged on EAC Common Market protocol