Managing the economy locally in Africa: Assessing local economies and their prospects

The programme to revive local economies in West Africa, called ECOLOC, was launched jointly by the Club du Sahel and the Municipal Development Programme (West and Central Africa module), to support the current decentralisation process in the region. It is based on the obvious truth that any decentralisation process that did not have a positive effect on local development would fail in its objective and would be highly likely to arouse serious disillusionment with democracy.The main ambition of the ECOLOC programme is thus to contribute to the various current discussions on the definition of decentralised or “localised” development strategies. This contribution focuses as yet mainly on the production of relevant economic data and a fuller understanding of local economic and social trends.