KENYA: Uganda’s Vice President Jessica Alupo has addressed the 24th COMESA summit and urged Member States to embrace regional integration as a survival strategy.
While representing President Yoweri Museveni at the just concluded summit in Nairobi-Kenya, Alupo said fragmented markets have for a long time confined African people in the vicious cycle of poverty.
The vice president asked the COMESA heads of State and Government to embrace value addition arguing that exporting of raw materials is self defeating.
She highlighted the significance of peace and stability as being indispensable and that without them, regional integration remains academic.
Alupo stressed that in order to make digitisation a true driver of growth, member countries must collectively eliminate barriers to trade, invest in infrastructure, energy and digital skills and prioritise industrialization and agro-processing.
Additionally the vice President appealed to COMESA summit to strengthen public-private partnerships, safeguarding regional peace and security and to harness the potential of women and youth.
She urged the participants to seize the opportunities and face the challenges with unity and resolve in order to build a COMESA that is prosperous, inclusive and resilient.
Alupo who doubles as the Woman MP for Katakwi district reaffirmed Uganda’s commitment to the COMESA agenda.
“Uganda stands ready to work with all Member States to deepen integration and deliver tangible prosperity for our people,” she said.
Guided by this year’s COMESA theme, ‘Leveraging digitalization to deepen Regional value chains for sustainable and inclusive growth’, the VP said the theme resonates well with the global trends on digitilization, science, technology and innovation to solve our problems.
She appealed to members to reflect on the barriers that technology has broken to enable us achieve our targets as COMESA member states.
“We must continue to accelerate the establishment of other complementary factors like infrastructure, electricity, human resources development, peace and security in order for us to achieve modern industrialized economies.
She emphasized that in Uganda, wealth and jobs are in four sectors of commercial agriculture, manufacturing/industry, services and ICT adding that COMESA is central to Uganda’s vision because currently our exports to the region exceed $2b annually.
The vice President was quick to add that while this sounds good, it presents both challenges and opportunities as Uganda’s Intra-COMESA trade still stands at only 6% of our total trade.
