The East African Community is a Regional Economic Community which comprises five countries, IGAD comprise eight countries, two of those countries happen to be also in the East African Community : Kenya and Uganda. Furthermore north we have Ethiopia, Sudan, South Sudan, Eritrea, Djibouti, Somali.
Most of the work we [The Horn Economic and Social Policy Institute -HESPI, Ethiopia] are doing focuses on regional integration issues, institution building, advocating better performance of economic management, policy formulation but not at a specific level. Most of the people think that the African Capacity Building Foundation [ACBF] only supports country specific like programs like you have the [Institute of Policy Analysis and Research] - IPAR, ZIPAR … but there are a couple of regional institutes including our own - that is the focus. We will go a little bit more of what we do and how the African Capacity Building Foundation has been able to help us.
The African Capacity Building Foundation, as some of your listeners probably already know, has created a number of policy institutes in this continent. HESPI is one of the more recent institutes that have been working with the African Capacity Building Foundation.
First and foremost, had it not been for ACBF I don’t believe that many of the institutes in this continent would exist now. What they do is to take an idea or the formation of an institute from the ground up. They nurture those institutes; they incubate those institutes and provide a significant amount of technical assistance in the formation process.
One of the other advantages of working with the African Capacity Building Foundation, at least true in our case, is that more than the technical side they have provided financial support, primarily to do two things: (1) to help us achieve the programs and implement the objectives that we have set out through the sub region that we are working on, but more importantly what they have provided is institution building [2]. It’s only through the support of ACBF that we have been able to build up our research capacity, our research support. We may find a lot of other institutions who are willing to support specific objectives, specific programs but very few are willing to invest in institution building.
Finally, I think the Foundation ACBF has been very supportive in helping sort of holding the hand of the new institute in terms of systems, procedures, whether it’s is how to procure in a systematic manner which is cost effective, whether it’s a matter of giving financial records etc. So I might say that out of the 30 – 40 [top] institutes that exist in the continent of Africa, most of them would not exist and if they exist would not be as effective as they are now without the support and nurturing that they receive or have received from the African Capacity Building Foundation.
