KAMPALA, Uganda – Uganda trade and industry minister, Amelia Kyambadde, has asked consultants working on improving trade in East Africa to support women living in border areas to pursue the available opportunities for increasing their incomes.

Last week, Kyambadde asked TradeMark Africa (TMA) to focus on educating and empowering informal women traders as a way of causing real impact and reducing poverty in their households.

“In most cases, these women end up losing all their goods when they are caught sneaking into another country. Or even risk being charged in courts of law and yet the laws and taxation at the border has been made easy with East African integration.”

“What is still lacking is empowering these women and educating them about their rights and responsibilities which I am requesting TradeMark to do in their next phase which will begin in 2017 to 2021,” Kyambadde said.

She told a workshop attempting to address the issue that women involved in informal cross border trade are not yet informed about their rights and responsibilities as traders.

Most of them prefer bribing officers or using ‘panyas’ or illegal routes to smuggle their small items to neighbouring countries. Kyambadde said the main reason is because of their ignorance and the myths associated with taxation which is not the reality.

Frank Matseart, the TMA Chief Executive Officer said, although they had invested considerable money in different trade projects, Uganda was still lagging behind its other EAC counterparts in terms of the ease of doing trade.

He said this is the reason why they wanted to share with different stakeholders especially business people about the real challenges that are still facing the Ugandan traders so that they can be worked on in their next phase of action.

“We have done this in Kenya, Burundi, Rwanda and Tanzania and their complaints were mainly of human empowerment like skilling. This workshop is intended to help us determine our next phase of action. We have so far been mostly successful in our first phase which started in 2011.”

“We have seen a lot of improvement especially with Uganda Revenue Authority and on the borders. Trading in Uganda has been made easier than it was a few years back. However, we haven’t caused the real impact that we intended. Uganda is still ranked low in trade facilitation. Kenya, Rwanda and Tanzania have improved tremendously. Our agenda now is to find out from different stakeholders what Uganda’s problems are so that we focus on that in our next plans which will be beginning in 2017,” Matseart said.

He said the TMA programs are meant to change the lives of the common Ugandan trader for the better and eradicate poverty.

He said however much they invest in new infrastructure; the real success will come when people appreciate these new innovations and begin using the facilities to improve their businesses.

“We have done much to automate most of the services however it is clear that a few people are using this technology. We still have traders who want to do a lot of paper work to clear their goods.

Even at the border, although we have tried hard to organize small women traders in groups where they can trade as one big company, we still have a lot of them who prefer to bribe officers or use short cuts to smuggle goods to another country and yet it would be easier to pass at the border officially. It’s all because they are still not empowered to demand for their rights but also know their obligations as traders. In our next agenda, we intend to work on skilling and empowering more traders to use our services,” he said.

Among other suggestions raised to improve the situation, were that TMA put more emphasis on agriculture by promoting value addition chains, skill young people who will be doing trade in the near future and also work on making Uganda a distributing centre to reduce on current trade imbalances. TMA was also asked to offer direct facilitation to beginner trades instead of only facilitation government entities.

Source: East African Business Week

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of TradeMark Africa.