Bioeconomy and Beyond: Unlocking Eastern Africa’s Sustainable Growth Potential
As a new wave of the global economy, bioeconomy integrates, in an efficient way, natural resources, technologies, people, market and policies to offer a realistic and solid platform for attaining substantiality. Capitalizing on the growth possibilities for the Eastern Africa economy will need diversification of resources.
Export commodities from the region are primarily processed and or semi-processed, enhancing value addition through agro-processing and establishing value chains is essential. Further, it will be necessary for the region to make use of available biobased resources to heighten trade. The high savings-investment gap that has persisted over time means it is crucial to strengthen the organization of resources to facilitate access to sufficient financing for investments.
Advancing Knowledge Accessibility and Policy Support in Eastern Africa
The EAC Bio-economy Observatory will support EAC, national policymakers and stakeholders with science-based evidence in bioeconomy. The platform will not primarily generate knowledge, but will collect, structure and make accessible knowledge from a wide range of scientific disciplines and sources on the bio-economy, the sustainable production of renewable biological resources and their conversion into valuable products. The East African bio-economy observatory (online knowledge centre) will provide a regional open access repository for bio-economy data and information. In specific, the observatory will: