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Members of the association of central banks in eastern African on Wednesday countries met in Bujumbura to assess the step already reached on creating a single African central bank and a single currency for the whole continent, the chairman of the association of central banks in eastern Africa told reporters.

"We have realized that 2011 was a year of high inflation in the whole eastern African region. We have therefore noticed that many criteria were not achieved in order to set up a single African central bank and a single currency for the African continent," said Gaspard Sindayigaya, chairman of the association of central banks in eastern African countries and governor of Burundi's central bank (BRB).

Sindayigaya stressed that the inflation that hit the eastern African countries in 2011 forced central banks to lend money to their governments. "We are going to analyze the situation and we will seek ways to readjust our economies in order to move forward to reach in three or four years a single African central bank," said Sindayigaya.

He said that a team of experts was set up to establish convergence criteria in an effort to harmonize their work. According to him, the AU requested central bank governors on the African continent to create five associations of central banks depending on regions where they are situated in order to expedite the project of creating a single African central bank and therefore a single African currency.

To spearhead the project of creating a single African central bank, the AU grouped central banks in five regions comprising the northern (Arab world), the western, the central, the eastern and the southern Africa. The chairman of the association of central banks in eastern Africa said that on May 31, central banks in the five African regions will submit a report to the their executive secretariat, in the Senegalese capital Dakar, on how far they have gone to implement the single African central bank.

Governors of central banks on the African continent will meet in the Algerian capital Algiers in August to assess how far the project of creating a single African central bank has gone. Sindayigaya said that the idea of creating the African central bank is a request of the African Union (AU).