The IOTA Foundation has stated that the initial stage of its cooperation with an East African business to facilitate paperless trading in the area has been completed successfully. The Foundation partnered with TradeMark Africa on the initiative, which aimed to modernize the continent’s supply chain’s inefficient and expensive paper-based procedures. This technique was substituted by a more effective digital approach system on the basis of IOTA’s ledger data platform, the Tangle. The Foundation collaborated with the Nairobi, Kenya-headquartered business to develop an interconnectivity technological framework that allows East African companies to “interact in a clear, safe, and immediate manner, both between themselves and with global associates.” TradeMark Africa (TMA) is a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting regional commercial development. According to their calculations, a single transaction in Africa necessitates the completion of 96 paper based documents on average. The situation is far worse for exporters. They misplace papers because they have to distribute them physically, which contributes to inefficiencies, which are usually always pricey. Along with TMA, the IOTA Foundation is working to alter this. The Trade Logistics Information Pipeline (TLIP), which centered on the Kenyan flower business, was their initial effort. It’s among Kenya’s most important industries, and is also one of Africa’s largest. Kenya exports around 180,000 tonnes of flowers each year, or nearly seven million stems each day. Because this sort of product is very perishable, having an effective and robust distribution chain is important. This is something that TLIP has already been giving to farmers and exporters. “In...

International trade, however, has a huge part to play in keeping the UK’s florists stocked with fresh cut flowers. The second top import market to the UK for flowers is Kenya, which supplies just over 8 percent of British-sold flowers, or 10,000 tons, worth not far off £67 million. Cut flowers account for 25% of all Kenyan imports to the UK. The Institute of Export & International Trade has been working with donor organization TradeMark Africa (TMA) to implement a ‘digital trade corridor’ between the UK and Kenya to help simplify trade between the two nations. The initiative, called the ‘UK-Kenya Trade Logistics Information Pipeline’ (TLIP), aims to eliminate documentation and introduce better visibility in the supply chains flowing between the UK and Kenya. This initiative builds upon on the Kenya-UK Economic Partnership Agreement, which was signed in December 2020. TLIP's system uses blockchain technology to link all those in a supply chain together, enabling faster logistics and easier trading. Marco Forgione, director general of the IOE&IT, said: “This Valentine’s Day when you were giving your loved one a beautiful bouquet of flowers, consider the journey they have taken to put that smile on their face. Around nine different organizations are involved with the transportation of flowers from Kenya before they enter your home and all of these actions in the supply chain require documentation to move the goods along on their journey. “The trade corridor we are creating will provide more transparency and enable all actors to view the...

From commercial to regulatory formalities, export procedures are often burdensome and time consuming for the average businessperson. Small delays in the implementation of any of these or more procedures have the potential to bring serious negative impact on businesses. “Buyers’ minds are often directed at obtaining a quality service or product, and in a timely manner. They are not too empathetic on procedural issues on the suppliers’ side. This burden is the exporters’ and cannot be shifted to anyone else,” explains Octavian Kiviryo, an expert in freight and logistics who has worked with many exporting businesses in Tanzania. Certificates of Origin (CoO) are important and mandatory pieces of documentation for the export business. As the name suggests, CoO details the origin of goods in a consignment. For a long time, a CoO cumbersome procedural requirement slowed down the exporting process from Tanzania. Tanzania Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (TCCIA) and Zanzibar National Chamber of Commerce, Industry & Agriculture (ZNCCIA) are the institutions vested with the full mandate of verifying the origin of all goods manufactured or processed in Tanzania for the export market and therefore, the issuance of the Certificates of Origin. For a long time, they used manual process, that was littered with a lot of paper-work and multiple visits by traders to offices. Today, and with support from TradeMark Africa (TMA) the two institutions have adopted an electronic system for application of CoO greatly cutting back on transaction costs and time traders incurred. This is premised on...

Modesta Nekesa, 31, has been a farmer for most of her adult life. However, it was not until two years ago that she started making money from her land by cultivating and selling a crop that was unfamiliar in her community - chilli. Ms. Nekesa lives in Busia, a town on the Kenya-Uganda border where she moved to after getting married at 17. She was widowed at 23 with three children. Her late husband, Michael Oluoch had bequeathed her five acres of land, but inheritance tussles saw half of it taken away by her brothers-in-law. And so, destiny subjected her to a life of subsistence, cultivating maize, beans, and occasionally sweet potatoes. She barter-traded some for other household utilities and the largest portion was consumed by her young family. "We fed off the land, and for years, I never had a shilling to my name. Any little money I got from selling part of my (not-so-good) harvests was immediately spent on books, pencils, uniform repairs or other such immediate needs," she said. All this changed after Ms. Nekesa accepted an invitation from a friend to attend an agriculture seminar organised by the Joyful Women Organization (JOYWO), an implementing partner of TradeMark Africa’s (TMA) Women and Trade programme. This course opened her eyes to a world of farming entrepreneurship. [caption id="attachment_55052" align="alignnone" width="640"] "We fed off the land, and for years, I never had a shilling to my name. Any little honey I got from selling part of my (notso-good) harvests...

More than 25,000 women across Africa have benefited from a TradeMark Africa (TMA) Women and Trade programme since 2015. This was revealed during the East Africa Trade and Development Forum (EATDF) held in Kampala between February 28 and March 1st, 2018. TMA has also increased market access for traders through establishment of cooperatives. Clare Kabakyenga is one of the programme beneficiaries and trades between the borders of Uganda and Rwanda. She recently scaled up to trade in Kenya’s Busia border. She shared with the audience her journey, successes and lessons. “I started trading to increase my income. My journey began in farming, first planting potatoes and then beans. Beans are viewed as women crops in my culture. Farmers in my district are mostly small scale and yet to penetrate markets competitively, you need volumes. So, we formed Manyakabi Area Cooperative enterprise which currently has 8105 farmers, 89% of who are women. Members supply the cooperative with maize and beans to bulk. Markets in Uganda were saturated by the same products and so, we contacted middle men who sold to Rwanda and Democratic Republic of Congo. On learning the profit margins, they got, we decided to take a risk and export to Rwanda. Our first export spent 8 days at the border because we had to get a certificate of origin (CoO) and a Phsytosanitary certificate. The CoO was from the export promotion board and Phsytosanitary certificate from ministry of agriculture. Being new in export business, we had a tough time...

Edna Mudibo, a Kenyan smallscale trader in the border town of Busia who frequents Uganda, has found a renewed drive to carry on with her business and has ended years of cat and mouse games with police officers and border officials. This, thanks to a new initiative that further seeks to bolster trade relations between Kenya and Uganda. Unwilling to pass through the gazetted routes due to payment of duty, Edna, and many of her fellow traders would use clandestine but dangerous routes to ferry goods across the Kenyan-- Ugandan border. At times she would hire a man in a wheelbarrow to transport her goods through rough terrain, away from the main road network which would take her days to cross the Kenyan side. When she would bump into police officers who were doing random surveillance, they would confiscate all her goods, take the money she had and sometimes beat her. “It is a terrible experience and sometimes women do this because of lack of experience. Majority of women who used to take these routes would end up being even raped by these policemen,” she said. She is among over 20,000 small scale traders in Kenya and Uganda who are now growing their fortunes by freely trading across the border, thanks to the new one stop border posts. The initiative, which was unveiled in February, 2018 by Presidents Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, combines two national border controls into one reducing the time it takes to...

Situated 1,441 kilometres from the commercial capital Dar es Salaam lies a border post called Mutukula between Tanzania and Uganda, near the shores of Lake Victoria. Until very recently electricity was only provided on the Ugandan side, leaving many small businesses on the Tanzanian side literally in the dark. However, things on the Tanzanian side changed with the construction of a One Stop Border Post, which included a ten kilometre stretch of electricity towards Bunazi in Tanzania. Locals have seen this as a huge boost for development in the area including being able to provide electricity to vital services including schools and hospitals. A One Stop Border Post (OSBP) brings together immigration, customs and other government officials from the two countries under one roof, doing away with the need for trucks and persons to undergo clearance twice at both sides of the border. TradeMark Africa partnered with the governments of Tanzania and Uganda to construct a One Stop Border Posts (OSBPs) to ease the movement of people and goods across the borders through reducing time and consequently cost incurred to cross the border. Mashaka Misapa is a barber from Mutukula village on the Tanzanian side. On 28 February 2014, the small border town was transformed when they were connected to the power grid which was being extended to the OSBP. "Before the construction of the OSBP, we had no electricity and we were forced to use a generator which consumed a lot of fuel and increased our costs, said the...

TMA partnered with Uganda’s NUCAFE to invest in a coffee roasting machine. This enabled farmers to process coffee beans, ultimately increasing the value of their produce by 30% as compared to selling raw unprocessed beans. NUCAFE seeks to improve the lives of coffee farmers by promoting a farmer ownership model. The model holds that farmers should own their product throughout the value chain, from the coffee beans to the final export product. For a long time, farmers were only “custodians of coffee” says Joseph Nkandu the Executive Director of Nucafe, one of TMA’s partner in Uganda. They sold raw coffee to cooperatives, where it was de-husked, sorted and graded. At each stage of the value chain, the price of coffee increased but the growers only received payment for the minimum value at the first stage. In the 1990s, the Ugandan government liberalized the coffee industry meaning private buyers could now compete with cooperatives to buy raw coffee from farmers. By 1993, unable to compete, cooperatives collapsed, leaving farmers in disarray. Power of one To bridge the gap, NUCAFE undertook research that revealed farmers were largely ignorant of coffee beyond the trees in their farms. With the survey results, NUCAFE drew up a five-year strategic plan that centred on training and creating awareness amongst farmers. Organizing farmers into associations and cooperatives, followed, with the agreement that cooperatives would maximize income for members. And so, began the farmer owner business model which is changing the face of the Uganda coffee industry. Steps...

If you wanted to transform 1,500 families in Tanzania, where would you start? How about with a cup of chocolate? By helping cocoa farmers in Tanzania access the market profitably, TMA’s Challenge Fund, beneficiary Kokoa Kamili is transforming their lives for the long term. 65 year old David Sanga lives in Mbingu Village in the Kilombero District of Tanzania and has grown cocoa for over ten years. Before every bean reaches the market, David must ensure that he has the right seedlings, that the trees are pruned, weeding done, the soil fertilised and the crop is free from pests for him to harvest a good crop. The crop should be delivered to collection centres which are set up for aggregation to ensure efficient access to markets. The buyers must offer him a competitive price for his cocoa beans for the practice to support his family. Thus, before the hot chocolate lands in your cup, there is a complex behind the scenes infrastructure that makes it possible. Kokoa Kamili is ensuring these behind the scenes activities benefit the farmers. Kokoa Kamili begun their project in Bingu in September 2014 after establishing that few cocoa buyers meant that local cocoa beans fetched poor prices comparative to other areas. The prices set by out-growers’ associations were also predetermined and non-negotiable. Transport costs to the collection points meant a further dip in farmers' profits. Poor seedlings affected the amount of produce down the line. Kokoa Kamili's mixed approach offers free collection services for wet...

30-year-old Annie Nakizibu Mirembe has crossed borders in trade to market and expand her steel welding business. “I started doing it as a hobby because I love art and design. I never went to school to acquire this skill,” the graduate of Bachelor of Library and Information Science says of breaking barriers in the male-dominated steel welding world and attests to the opening up of markets in the East African Community. Ms. Mirembe employs six Ugandans and two Kenyans in her welding shop, based in Katwe, a Kampala suburb. As a cross border trader, Mirembe is no stranger to intra-regional trade challenges as just two weeks ago, she experienced a four day delay at the Malaba border as she shipped metal products to Kenya, “The system was down and no one explained. Such incidences make traders like us incur extra costs on accommodation and food and also delays our obligations to our clients.” She says. As a cross border trader, Mirembe is one of the few who grabbed the opportunities provided by EAC treaty and is already celebrating success. She has export clientele in Rwanda and Kenya and plans to enter the Burundi market in the near future.  The EAC Treaty states that the first stage of the integration would be the formation of a Customs Union with its primary objective being to facilitate inter and intra-regional trade in goods. “The trade system on the borders makes cross-border trade for small businesses like mine very fast and easy,” she says....