Kenya has failed to set goals and develop a mechanism to measure the progress of the protracted trade talks with the European Union, United Arabs Emirates and Indonesia, which has denied the country opportunities abroad, Parliament has found.
The Departmental Committee on Trade, Industrialisation and Cooperatives of the National Assembly has fallen short of blaming the slow progress in reaching binding preferential trade deals with the EU bloc, UAE and Indonesia on a lack of quantifiable indicators to measure progress.
“The Committee observed that there were no key performance indicators and targets for these negotiations,” the legislators wrote in a report following engagement with the Trade Department on budgetary allocation for the year starting July.
Kenyan goods access the 27-member Eurozone duty- and quota-free on an interim deal reached in 2016 after Nairobi failed to convince Tanzania, Uganda and Burundi to sign the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) it had successfully negotiated with the EU two years earlier.
Rwanda signed the deal which Kenya negotiated and concluded on behalf of the now seven-country East African Community bloc in October 2014 but failed to ratify it into its laws.
Tanzania and Uganda have not endorsed the EAC-EU EPA for various economic and political interests, prompting the EAC heads of State summit in March 2021 to allow individual countries to engage the EU under the “principle of variable geometry”.
This is unlike the past when all EAC member States were required to sign and ratify the EPA with the EU for it to come into force.
