(Business in Cameroon) - On February 16th, 2021, Daniel Ona Ondo (photo), President of the CEMAC Commission made a plea for the reinforcement of the single subregional services market. The official made the plea during a videoconference attended by Ministers of the CEMAC region for the validation of draft texts regulating services trade. Once validated, the texts will be submitted to the Council of Ministers of the Economic Union of Central Africa (UEAC) at their next session.  

"The consolidation of our common services market is a crucial step for the competitiveness of service providers operating in our member States," Daniel Ona Ondo said. To this end, the President of the Commission insisted on the need to pursue regulatory harmonization, which started several years ago and is still ongoing in the CEMAC region. He invited the Ministers to validate the technical contributions formulated by the expert commission because doing so will provide member countries with comparative advantages that will help CEMAC-labeled companies be sufficiently competitive.

Ten draft community texts need to be validated currently, he said.  They cover nine sectors identified as essential to the development of the sub-region. They are namely communication services, business services, education services, financial services, tourism and travel services, recreational, cultural, and sports services, transport services, and finally, health and social services.

The aim of these texts is to streamline legislations, which hinder the development of services in the subregion because they differ from a country to the other.  According to Daniel Ona Ondo, in 2017-2018, services trade represented over a third of CEMAC’s trades and contributed the most to formal and informal job creation.

S.A.