This Treaty Establishing the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa “COMESA” aims : to attain sustainable growth and development of the Member States by promoting a more balanced and harmonious development of its production and marketing structures and to promote joint development in all fields of economic activity and the joint adoption of macro-economic policies and programmes to raise the standard of living of its peoples and to foster closer relations among its Member States and to co-operate in the creation of an enabling environment for foreign, cross border and domestic investment including the joint promotion of research and adaptation of science and technology for development and to co-operate in the promotion of peace, security and stability among the Member States in order to enhance economic development in the region and to co-operate in strengthening the relations between the Common Market and the rest of the world and the adoption of common positions in international fora and to contribute towards the establishment, progress and the realisation of the objectives of the African Economic Community.

This report was drafted by Sami Zouari in July 2013 in Sfax and Tunis. Besides the desk review and statistical data analysis, 22 stakeholders – representatives of government offices, social partners (trade unions and employer organisations), donors, and civil society – were interviewed to gather their opinions on the country’s employment policies and programmes. The report provides an overview of current employment policies and active labour market programmes in the country, and a qualitative assessment of their results and outcomes.

This guide provides governments, procuring entities and other stakeholders with a deeper understanding of the challenges faced by women-owned businesses to participate in public procurement markets - offers tools to address these challenges and stimulate increased entrepreneurial activity by women owned businesses; provides a brief overview of the public procurement objectives of public procurement systems; highlights common challenges faced by women-owned businesses in public procurement markets and discusses techniques to address them; reviews affirmative action policies and programmes to build the capacity of women-owned businesses and to encourage their participation in public procurement; discusses metrics, monitoring and evaluating progress towards policy objectives, as well as enforcing compliance with preferential procurement policies; includes bibliographical references

This report finds legal and regulatory barriers to women’s economic inclusion have decreased over the past 50 years globally, but many laws still hinder women’s participation in the economy. Laws restricting women’s economic activity are currently most prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa, Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The third in a series, Women, Business and the Law 2014: Removing Restrictions to Enhance Gender Equality monitors regulations affecting women entrepreneurs and employees in 143 economies. This edition highlights reforms carried out over the past two years, examines the evolution of women’s property rights and legal decision making ability since 1960 and expands coverage to examine legal protections addressing violence against women.

The OECD, WTO and UNCTAD have provided new metrics and will extend their work to better assess the impact of GVCs on trade, investment, development, growth and jobs. The message from on-going work presented in this report is clear: Global value chains are the consequence of and depend upon open markets, and need to be complemented with appropriate policy frameworks including for strengthening of productive capacities. The fragmentation of production in GVCs should also be accompanied by at least a changed emphasis in trade and investment policies which takes more actively into account the growing interdependence between policy stances of exporters and importers, host countries and home countries. Moreover, ambitious economic integration agreements that more coherently cover all dimensions of market access (not least access to key inputs) can help countries to maximise the gains from production sharing. At the same time, open and stable trade and investment policies need to be accompanied by a range of other sound policies to pave the way for any economy to access, and benefit from, those value chains.