Training and strategy session for East African Community Competition Authority
Armin Cuyvers and Belle Beems recently travelled to Nairobi to deliver an intensive three-day training programme and strategy session for the East African Community Competition Authority (EACCA).
The EACCA is a young competition authority and has recently begun operating its merger control regime. At this formative moment, the training aimed to strengthen the EACCA’s practical and institutional expertise through capacity building and knowledge exchange.
The program was designed for EACCA staff and commissioners from the different EAC partner states, including Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Uganda, Somalia and Burundi. For the occasion, they were joined by Minke de Haan and Annemieke van der Beek, both lawyers at Kennedy van der Laan in Amsterdam. Over three days, the group worked through a broad range of topics spanning competition law, institutional design, merger control and comparative methodology.
Sessions moved from general strategy discussions into more detailed topics, such as the substantive and procedural obligations of EU and EAC merger control, and very specific questions of institutional design. Throughout, participants considered how the EAC’s competition law framework relates to COMESA and to other regional initiatives.
What emerged was a productive exchange. Bringing together commissioners, legal practitioners and academics from several jurisdictions created space for sharing reflections on the challenges of building and running a competition authority, developing a merger control framework and fostering regulatory cooperation.
Following the success of the training, the EACCA and Leiden University are now exploring ways to deepen their collaboration, for instance through follow-up training sessions, visits by EACCA staff and commissioners to Leiden, and the development of online courses that would allow the exchange to continue.