The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) is tapping into the 11th European Union Development Fund to finance projects to make Africa’s airlines globally competitive.

The European Development Fund is to provide a $9 million grant to Africa’s Open Skies project to make air travel cheaper, faster and safer by liberalising airspace.

Africa is home to 12 per cent of the world’s people, but it accounts for less than 1 per cent of the global air service market.

READ: Turbulent state of African aviation

“The programme will enable us to address air transport challenges, and continue the implementation of current programmes,” said Abu Sufian Dafalla, director for infrastructure at Comesa.

He was speaking in Kigali at the Comesa Communication Navigation Surveillance and Air Traffic Management workshop.

The purpose of the air transport programme is to ensure harmonised implementation of activities under the air transport liberalisation programme, safety oversight, search and rescue, investigations of accidents and capacity building between Comesa and EU member states.

Yamoussoukro Declaration

Despite signing the Yamoussoukro Declaration in 1999, which called for the liberalisation of African skies for African airlines, individual countries still lock continental airlines out of their airspace.

The result of the lack of commitment by African countries to open up their skies was that by 2013, over 80 per cent of the intercontinental traffic to and from Africa was dominated by airlines registered outside the continent, the African Airlines Association (Afraa) said. The dominance of European airlines is partly because of restrictive aviation regulations the EU adopted locking out many African airlines.

In 2010, Afraa reported that 13 of the 17 countries affected by the EU ban were from Africa, with a total of 111 African airlines blacklisted.

International Air Transport Association director general and CEO Tony Tyler listed world class safety, smart regulation, low cost environment, appropriate infrastructure, and sustainability for the future as the five areas Africa needs to address to become competitive in the industry.