UNIDO gives Fillip to West African Economy

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) is understood to have decided to chart out plans to boost trade partnership within West Africa. The UNIDO Director Felix Ugbor laid out the agency’s position at the opening ceremony of the Annual General Meeting (AGM) of Investment Promotion Agencies of West African States in Abuja.

Ugbor apprised that the organization was working on a project that would promote trade relationship within the West Africa sub-region. He further clarified that the agency would be involved in the project in Africa to focus on three major areas, including investors' survey, capacity building, self contracting and capacity exchange.

As a first step to the implementation the project, the agency is believed to collect various data from 20 countries, including Nigeria, for designing policies. Ugbor appealed all African investors to take interest in the project as the capacity building for various companies would create an economic environment to develop small and medium scale enterprises, the future of financial independence.

While Peter Oluonye, the representative of ECOWAS, expressed that an effective public sector was necessary to tap private initiatives. In his opinion, ECOWAS envisaged a private sector, which would be at the forefront of economic growth.

The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is a regional group of fifteen countries, founded in 1975. Its mission is to promote economic integration in "all fields of economic activity", particularly industry, transport, telecommunications, energy, agriculture, natural resources, commerce, monetary and financial questions, social and cultural matters in the region.

In a report by The Nigerian Observer, Oluonye suggested that policy makers should ensure that their collaboration with the public sector fully understood and addressed issues of productivity, employment generation and poverty reduction. Likewise, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, the Chairman, African Business Roundtable, was of the opinion that the prospect of African Community, as envisaged in the African Union Charter, depended on its economy.

By Jose Roy