This program seeks to promote fair trade and investment regimes for fair, just and accountability in decision making processes. The program facilitates the participation of public and CSOs in the development of Trade and Investment regimes in Africa by ensuring that they have the right information and are updated regularly on different agreements; policies; laws; and regulations developed to promote Trade; Investments and Economic Integration.
Under this, Econews envisages to be a leading voice providing alternative policy options and ensure that public are the centre of such policy discourses.
The World Bank (WB) and International Monetary Fund (IMF) sponsored structural adjustment policies (SAPs) introduced from the mid-1980s and enforced by means of aid-based conditionality throughout Africa were introduced as a response to the challenges associated with resource mobilization in African countries. however, SAPs became a project of neoliberal, free market ideology, aiming to install the primacy of the market throughout all economic relations and social provisioning around the globe.
Investment policy thus came to be defined around the primary goal of creating conditions favourable to attracting the foreign investor. Foreign investment has become closely intertwined with financial dealings, and with the exotic new products and instruments of the age of financialization. The loosening of regulations to encourage foreign investment has thereby also created space to affect policy for all these financial instruments. Econews interest in this space is to mobilize a critical mass of informed stakeholders to advocate for the reform of financial policies in a manner that will encourage domestic resource mobilization and the deployment of foreign investment in strategic sectors in light of its outward transfer of resources from the domestic economies and also undertake sustained advocacy on public debt which has been increasingly growing owing to the challenges of domestic resource mobilization.
