Brussels, 5th October 2022: The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Embassies based in Brussels, Belgium, hosted a business seminar to commemorate SADC Day. The seminar was held under the theme: “Promoting Industrialization through Agro-Processing, Mineral Beneficiation, and Regional Value Chains for Inclusive and Resilient Economic Growth”.
The day was dedicated to discussions about: i) SADC’s regional integration agenda, ii) the framework that guides integration, ii) the status of regional integration, iii) investment opportunities and iv) programmes/projects that guide investment and regional development of regional value chains.
To ensure sustainable economic growth and development it was agreed that it is important to grow SADC’s value chains and comparative advantages in health, mining, energy etc. Advancement of these areas will require value addition and value chain development, trade barrier elimination, improved product quality, capacity building, human resource development, faster implementation of projects as well as monitoring and evaluation of regional development projects.
Exchanges concurred that element such as peace, security, development financing, infrastructure development, education, political stability and ease of movement of goods and people need to be improved as they are key investment and integration promoters.
Participants included SADC Member States, the SADC Secretariat, the European Union (EU), private sector companies in SADC and other key stakeholders. Botswana, Malawi, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Namibia were members of the Taskforce that organised the event.
