In January 2017 in Abuja, a focused group meeting was organised by ITUC-Africa with the support of the Solidarity Center and was attended by representatives of PSI, OTUWA, EATUC, the leadership of the NLC, focal persons from Nigeria, Zambia, Tanzania and Swaziland. One of main decisions taken include the formation of a Pan African Trade Union Tax Justice Group comprising of national, sub-regional and continental trade union organisations as well as Global Union Federations (GUFs) active on the campaign in Africa. It was also decided that progressive civil society allies be aligned to the group whose creation would help improve coordination and cohesion of the campaign thereby advancing workers’ awareness and mobilisation.
In order to push these issues forward, a two day meeting, on the 12 and 13 July 2017, was organised at the Mirror hotel, in Kigali, Rwanda. Among the participants, we have representatives of ITUC-Africa, EATUC, TUCOSWA, ZCTU, OWATU, PSI, TJN-A, ActionAid and FEMNET.
This meeting was an occasion to evaluate the contribution of each organisation to the #StopTheBleeding campaign and to elaborate a roadmap for the upcoming days in order to contribute to the effective take-off and acceleration of the African structural transformation agenda In pursuit of the decent work agenda.
At the end of the meeting a numbers of recommendations were proposed by the participants as a way forward. These recoomendations include such as :
– reinforcing the alliance beetwenn trade unions and CSOs for better campaign efficiency, resource mobilisation and sustainability possibilities ;
– Conducted more research than can be relied on for generating data to boost the campaign.
– Engaging economic and influential structures such as the ECOWAS, ATAF etc…
– Better reach-out and capacity building exchanges with Francophone unions and CSOs.
– Popularise the list of demands.
– US tour: a three city tour of activists with the aim to take emulate similar successful work done initially in the US and increase understanding of American trade unionists of IFF from Africa and be in solidarity
