A joint delegation from TradeMark Africa (TMA), Mastercard Foundation, and the International Trade Centre (ITC) recently visited a young woman-led horticultural export business in Rwamagana, Rwanda. This visit underscored their collective commitment to helping Rwandan youth and women-led horticultural enterprises achieve significant success in export markets. The delegation gained valuable insights into ongoing interventions and their emerging impact, all designed to enhance value addition, improve market access, and create meaningful employment opportunities for young people, particularly young women, within Rwanda's expanding horticultural sector. The host for this visit was RAI Green Stalks Ltd, an enterprise participating in the Value-added Initiative to Boost Employment (VIBE). VIBE is a collaborative effort between TMA and ITC, in partnership with Mastercard Foundation. RAI Green Stalks Ltd is a key exporter of fresh produce, including chillies, avocados, French beans, plantains, and passion fruits, to international destinations like the United Kingdom, the European Union, and the United Arab Emirates. Allen Umulisa, founder and CEO of RAI Green Stalks Ltd, noted that the increasing demand for her company's products has outpaced its internal production capacity. To address this, the enterprise collaborates with youth-owned cooperatives and aggregates supply, enabling it to meet larger export volumes while upholding the stringent quality standards demanded by international buyers. This approach of sourcing products from local cooperatives and smallholder farmers, many of whom are women and young people, generates economic opportunities for these individuals, thereby fostering a positive ripple effect on their livelihoods. The delegation also toured several of the enterprise's operational...

Three Rwandan small and medium-sized fresh produce companies recently showcased their products at the 2025 Fruit Logistica Expo in Berlin, Germany, making strides towards unlocking new opportunities in the export market. The exhibition, held from February 5–7, is one of the world’s largest trade fairs for the fresh produce industry. This year’s gathering brought together an estimated 66,000 visitors and 2,700 exhibitors from 145 countries, offering Kinvest Farms Company, Lotec Rwanda Ltd, and Effective M&N a global platform to promote their products, businesses, and prospect for new customers for their niche horticultural produce. Their participation was part of the five-year Value-added Initiative to Boost Employment (VIBE) programme that is implemented in Rwanda by TradeMark Africa (TMA), the International Trade Centre (ITC), in partnership with Mastercard Foundation. “Occasions such as this expo avail valuable opportunities for Rwanda’s fresh produce exporters to explore new markets, enhance their earning potential, and improve the prospects for other local enterprises to expand into European and global markets. By engaging directly with international stakeholders, these firms gained critical insights into market dynamics and established connections with potential buyers and strategic partners,” said Doreca Musenga, VIBE Programme at TradeMark Africa. The three companies, who are part of the many VIBE programme participants, collectively produce and export a variety of fresh produce, including French beans, passion fruits, chilies, snow peas, bird’s eye chilies, bananas, green chilies, habanero, and avocados. Despite their exponential potential, these firms, like many other micro, small and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs), face several challenges in...

Members of European Parliament’s International Trade Committee, on November 3, 2022, held talks with teams from TradeMark East Africa, Kenya’s Ministry of Trade and regional private sector representatives on investment opportunities, trade relations and barriers. Led by committee chair, Bernd Lange, the team sought to understand key concerns around the interim Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) between Kenya and the EU and how trading between the two partners can be more mutually beneficial. Mr. Lange also highlighted the need to reflect on a regional perspective in the negotiations with Kenya, which is no longer categorised as a least developed country (LDC) as its East African Community (EAC) counterparts. While the country’s exports still benefit from preferential treatment, Kenyan exporters face stringent requirements on labelling, rules of origin and phytosanitary standards, according to the State Department of Trade. In the last half a decade, Kenya has been a net buyer of commodities from the EU, with imports hitting US$1.9 billion in 2019, less than half of the US$916 million Kenya exported to the EU, according to the Overseas Development Institute (ODI). Kenya exports mostly horticultural products. With favourable trade conditions and increased efficiencies in the production and supply chains, Kenya can significantly scale up its share of exports of cut flowers, vegetables, macadamia, avocados, sweet potatoes, pineapples, coffee, and apparel, in response to burgeoning demand in the EU. The delegation also heard of how Kenya and East Africa are positioned to tap into the immense potential of the African Continental Free Trade...

[vc_row equal_height="yes" content_placement="top"][vc_column width="1/2"][vc_column_text]EATTA’s Integrated Tea Trading System (iTTS) which automated the manual trade processes along the tea value chain for traders using the Mombasa Tea Auction has improved efficiency and transparency resulting to reduced costs and time of trading for tea traders, evaluations show. The system is funded by the Danish Ministry of Foreign Affairs through TradeMark Africa. ITTS covers the dispatch of made tea from the factory, receiving of the tea by the Warehouse, cataloguing and offering the tea for sale by the Broker, buying of the tea and paying for it by the buyer and the finally collecting the bought tea from the warehouse. According to a recent evaluation, overall costs incurred by tea traders who are producers, brokers and buyers/exporters has reduced from US$4,533 before iTTS) in 2017 to US$1,889 after iTTS in 2021, a reduction of 58% against a target of 15%.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width="1/2"][vc_video link="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6mbvhDDa6Ns" align="center"][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]Specifically, the costs that have been eliminated are transactional and logistical and includes key items such as printing costs, travel time and costs, refreshment etc. Additionally, the tea trade cycle time has reduced by 10 days, from 38 days in 2017 to 28 days in 2021. iTTS has remedied limitations in the old manual set-up, such as the lack of in-depth consolidated auction statistics, and limitation on the scale up of the mandatory physical presence in the auction house of participants in the auction. Members can now access real-time information for the entire tea trade cycle. A member can access post-sale...

In the line of my work for an aid-for-trade organisation, I recently traversed key trade corridors across the African continent to assess their current state of play. These include Abidjan-Lagos in the West, Mombasa-Goma in the East and Durban-Lubumbashi to the South. Travelling mainly by road along these crucial trade routes revealed the vast trade opportunities they hold, as well as the great potential for intra-continental and global trade. Daunting challenges were also quite clear, including the low quality of infrastructure and interconnectivity (hard and soft), limited awareness of cross-border trade potential, differing trade regimes, red tape and differing customs systems, among others. The result of these challenges is not only a choked trade environment attendant to high transport costs but also significantly higher Green House Gas emissions (GHG) along the corridors. Take the Northern Corridor, a leading trade route connecting Mombasa Port, along the Eastern Seaboard of Sub-Saharan Africa, with the region’s 250 million people in East Africa’s hinterland, including the nations of Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Ethiopia, DRC, and South Sudan. GHGs are unacceptably high, at 1.72 million metric tonnes of carbon dioxide. This is 2.3 times and 1.22 times more than the GHG intensity, in similar corridors, across China and Europe respectively. A growing trade partnership between Europe and Africa demands the modernisation of these crucial trade routes, which will pay great dividends for both Europe and Africa. As the ongoing conflict in Ukraine has demonstrated, there is an urgent need for sustainable connectivity between the continents...