Regional Economic Communities - Exploring the Process of Socio-economic Integration in Africa - E-book - ePub

The unprecedented speed at which change occurs in different countries and in all aspects of people's lives over the last two decades; has madeit imperative to revisit the erection of any kind of barriers across countries' borders. Viewed in the context of ideological, economic, technological or developmental perspectives, there has been increasing inter-societal, or better still, inter-regional competiveness across vast geographical spaces.
This has brought about a need for capacity strengthening beyond respective nationalistic frameworks, and more significantly at the level of economic functioning in order to strengthen the competitive advantage of participating member-states (Adeniran 2012:2). Against this background, Regional Economic Communities (RECs) in Africa are described as imperative platforms for grouping individual countries together within different sub-regions for the specific objectives of attaining greater socio-economic unification.