Africa rides on hope and progress to sweep away old negative stereotypes

We are working together with East African Community nations on improving aviation security and infrastructure development, addressing piracy in the West Indian Ocean, and ensuring that the benefits of economic integration translated into broad-based prosperity for the people.

Because ultimately, success must be measured in the results people see in their daily lives.

Sub-Saharan Africa has some 14 regional trade or cooperation agreements, many of them overlapping and not all as successful as the East African Community.

Let’s work together to bring coherence to this patchwork. Let’s promote the institutions that work. Let’s share best practices.

Let’s be sure that we are maximising what is closest to home – markets that are only going to get bigger if they are nurtured and given the chance to grow.

And the continent has achieved progress in recent years toward building a regional security and political architecture.

The African Union has developed into a pillar of regional cooperation and a number of sub-regional organisations, such as Ecowas, are playing crucial roles in peacekeeping, democracy promotion, conflict resolution, and now food security.

We’ve committed at least $15 million to Ecowas’s regional food security plan and we’re working on a wide range of other problem-solving regional efforts.

But now is the time to extend this progress to economic cooperation.