The COMESA Council of Ministers during its 34th meeting held in Addis Ababa in March 2015, directed the Secretariat to convene a meeting of the policy think tanks and the private sector in the region to brief them on the frontier issues for research necessary to support regional integration.

The Council observed that policy research can directly support regional integration by addressing practical challenges and directed COMESA to embrace the Triple Helix Concept of collaboration between the Government, private sector and academia in implementing the research programme.

As a response to the directive, the COMESA-ACBF Funded Project on Capacity Building on Economic and Trade Policy Analysis and Research called for research papers on pertinent regional integration issues which have been peer reviewed and are being finalized by the authors. These papers will be presented during the Annual Research Forum organized and funded by the project on 10-14 August 2015 in Kampala, Uganda.

The main objective of the research forum is to strengthen the participation of the government, leading policy research think tanks, academia and the private sector in regional integration agenda. Specifically, the forum will create a COMESA forum for sharing and discussing regional integration research findings, the COMESA regional university will be discussed by various participating universities, Research areas emanating from the COMESA Summit of March 2015 will be shared and discussed and further areas of research which will be the focus of 2016 will be identified.