COMESA - Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa

History and Background

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA ), established by Treaty in 1994, superseded the Preferential Trade Area for Eastern and Southern Africa (PTA), which, in turn, was established in 1981. COMESA currently comprises 19 member states: Burundi, Comoros, Democratic Republic of Congo, Djibouti, Egypt, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Kenya, Libya (since June 2005), Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritius, Rwanda, Seychelles, Sudan, Swaziland, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Ivory Coast and Tunisia  have attended Summits as observers.

COMESA has seen the withdrawal of Angola, Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia and Tanzania.

The COMESA Secretariat Offices are based in Lusaka, Zambia.

The inception of COMESA was to take advantage of a larger market size, to share the region’s common heritage and destiny and to allow greater social and economic co-operation with the ultimate objective of creating an economic community. The aims and objectives of COMESA are to facilitate the removal of the structural and institutional weaknesses of member states, so that they are able to attain collective and sustained development.

COMESA member states have agreed on the following integration strategy:

• Setting-up of a full free trade area, including the removal of all non-tariff barriers, for the free movement of goods and services produced within the COMESA region.
• Establishment of a customs union with a common external tariff structure that will be applied to goods and services imported from non-COMESA countries by 2004.
• The free movement of capital and investment, supported by theadoption of common investment practices;
• The free movement of persons supported by the adoption of common visa arrangements;
• A progressive setting-up of a payments union based on the COMESA Clearing House;
• Establishment of a common monetary union by 2025.

So far, COMESA’s main focus has been on strengthening outward-oriented regional integration (within the framework of the WTO) through removal of tariff and non-tariff barriers and adoption of trade and investment facilitation measures. Although market integration is still an unfinished agenda, recently, the integration strategy has been broadening to include supply-side areas such as transport and communications infrastructure development and COMESA's commitment towards a broadening integration agenda has been demonstrated by the resolutions made at the 1st COMESA-SADC-EAC Tripartite Summit held in Kampala, Uganda on Ocotber 22, 2008. The milestone EAC-SADC-COMESA Summit is considered historic because for the first time, since the birth of the African Union (AU), key building blocks of the African Economic Community  met on how to integrate territories and moving towards deepening and widening integration within the overall Abuja Treaty for the establishment of the African Economic Community.