THE government is committed to working with the private sector to make sure Tanzania played active role in the regional integration process, the Permanent Secretary in the Ministry of East African Cooperation, Ms Joyce Mapunjo, has said.

She said in Dar es Salaam that the government was welcoming more engagement with the private sector to address issues that affect trade and investments in the country.

“The government is very much committed to work with the private sector to improve the business environment,” she told the East African Community Secretary General forum with the Chief Executive Officers of business organisations in the EAC region.

The PS encouraged the private sector to engage more with the government on matters affecting trade and investments and noted the government would even entertain informal meetings to speed up process of addressing particular hassles to the private sector.

“We support more engagement with the private sector. Formal and even informal arrangements are most of the times entertained to make things go faster,” she said.

The PS said the government was working on tax and standard harmonization, two areas that have been raised by the private sector as a problem in efforts to boost trade and investments in the region.

She said non-tariff barriers to trade was an area where the government made significant progress but noted addressing the NTBs was a continuous process calling for the cooperation of the private sector.

Earlier, the Secretary General of the East African Community, Dr Richard Sezibera, said there were good progress on harmonization of domestic taxes in the region noting Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda had already ratified the EAC Agreement Double Taxation Avoidance Agreement and Tanzania was preparing to do the same.

He said the region had managed to resolve 70 NTBs across the region and work on elimination of those pending was continuing.

He said the East Africa Legislative Assembly had in March this year passed the EAC Elimination of Non-Tariff Bill, 2015, a new development that the private sector need to utilize to further the efforts towards addressing the NTBs.

“We expect the private sector to utilize this development to ensure the removal of all existing NTBs and at the same time ensure no other NTBs are introduced,” he said.

Dr Sezibera said he hoped that EAC member states would fast-track the assent to the bill to make sure the long awaited law became operational. On the Customs Union, he said the integration process had been a great success with the region most recently benefited through enhanced trade through Common External Tariff (CET).

“A good example is that goods, which meet the criteria of rules of origin, have been moving across borders without paying taxes. Most importantly, Trade is now at 23 per cent over and above the intra African trade figure of 12 per cent,” he said.

“There has been a 300 per cent increase in the value of trade from two billion US Dollars in 2005 to six billion US Dollars in 2014.

These numbers, coupled with the combined EAC GDP of 110.3 billion US Dollars with an average annual rate growth, of 2.6 per cent makes our region a formidable trade and economic bloc.”

The EAC SG revealed that the region was in final stages of setting up a $20 Million EAC Private Sector Fund as a vehicle for boosting greater participation of the private sector in the ongoing integration process. He said the fund would be launched in November this year by Heads of State of EAC member states.

Source: All Africa

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