THE STATE OF EAST AFRICA 2012. DEEPENING INTEGRATION, INTENSIFYING CHALLENGES

More than a decade since it was rekindled, the East African Community integration process is deepening, but the challenges facing the integration units and people are intensifying.

Nairobi, 2 April 2012: 'The final responsibility for shaping East Africa’s future lies with its citizens'. This is one of the key conclusions of a new State of East Africa Report 2012: Deepening Integration, Intensifying Challenges, published by the Society for International Development (SID), with support from TradeMark East Africa (TMEA).


The Report, launching on April 4, 2012 at a ceremony presided over by the East African Community (EAC) Secretary General Ambassador (Dr.) Richard Sezibera and SID International President Ambassador Juma Mwapachu at the Hilton Hotel in Nairobi at 10am, will open, encourage and inform a wide range of conversations about how the EAC regional integration is proceeding and what it means for ordinary people’s lives.

'Regional integration is a complicated but evolving process that starts and ends with the citizenry', said Ambassador Juma V. Mwapachu, President of SID International and the immediate former EAC Secretary General. 'One of the major goals of the State of East Africa report is to provide policy makers, civil society and the private sector with information and analysis that they can use to advocate their concerns and interests with respect to regional integration'.

The State of East Africa 2012 updates and improves on the inaugural State of East Africa 2006: Trends, Tensions and Contradictions: The Leadership Challenge and it compiles and analyses data across key economic, social and political indicators from the five member states of the EAC.


Some of the report’s key findings and insights are:

You Do or You Don’t?

Make up your mind, if you’re going to get engaged in something, do it to finish and for the hard core, gung-ho trail blazers amongst us, do it to win! You can’t do things in half measure, man, if you’re in it, then be in it to win it!

What am I talking about? I’m talking about “taking initiative”. I have noticed something that troubles me some; people who initiate a stimuli then sit and wait. I wonder, when people don’t take initiative to follow up with others on something that, if not completed, will reflect negatively on them (the initiator), is it because (a) they believe that after having initiated the communication, their burden of “taking initiative” has already been discharged, or; (b) they want to respect due process of transmission and response and so, after having submitted, they now wait, for the natural next step, that is, the recipient to respond?