AfricaPress-Tanzania: THE process to establish Tanzanian SADC National Committee (SNC) is still on progress, with the government collecting views from stakeholders on the best way to set up the body.
The SNC is a structure for the formulation, coordination and overseeing implementation of SADC policies and strategies at national level.
“We are still in progress. We are in the process of putting together comments and views on how to establish the committee,” Ms Agness Kayola, Acting Director of Regional Integration in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and East African Cooperation, said over the weekend.
She gave the explanation over the development on the establishment of the SNC in the country during the virtue dialogue to develop strategies for strengthening engagements between the government, private Sector, civil society as well as the media in the implementation of the SADC Vision and SADC Regional Indicative Development Plan (RISDP).
The virtual dialogue was coordinated by the Eastern and Southern Africa Smallholder Farmers Forum (ESAFF) and the Southern Africa Trust (SAT) with support from German International Cooperation Agency (GIZ). She said the GIZ was helping the country with technical skills on how to establish the SNC.
“We had training with the GIZ to see how to establish the committee,” she stated.
Mr Ishmael Chip, from the GIZ, said that the organisation was supporting Tanzania to establish the committee like it did in other countries such as Zambia.
“We are looking forward to engage civil societies to ensure that we also put Tanzania on the map,” Mr Chip stated.
Participants offered various ideas on how Tanzania could do more in implementing the SADC RISDP, among others, they advised the Parliament to ratify pending SADC protocols to enable domestication of the regional body’s protocols.
Prof Mohamed Bakari from the University of Dar es Salaam (UDSM) recommended that in order the country to effectively implement the RISDP on industrialisation, agriculture and trade the government and Parliament should promote policy coherence in industrialisation, trade and agriculture to reduce policy inconsistency across administrations, such as reliance on market-based solutions versus state-based solutions so as to promote sustainability of development projects.
The government should selectively protect some of the key local industries, such as sugar industries against external competition.
