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...

Elizabeth Marami did not really know what she was getting into, when she applied to become a marine captain through the Kenya Ports Authority (KPA).  “It was not something that I was interested in as a kid, but I was always up for a challenge. When I got called in and I learnt what it was about I totally fell in love with the whole idea.”  Now Kenya’s first female marine pilot and a certified second officer, Elizabeth is the only woman out of 17 other trainee pilots at the port. At 26 years old, she is also among the younger people in her field. Neither this, nor the eight-hour days, or long months at sea, faze Elizabeth. She recalls spending one Christmas sailing to Saudi Arabia, in the middle of nowhere, with no cell phone network. “Such things make you really feel intimidated and for a split second you can question why you even chose to be here. But then you must know your end game. If you do, you can persevere and keep on going. If you are a go-getter you can achieve anything you want to achieve.” Still it requires something of an adjustment when Elizabeth first boards the ship and is the only woman in a crew of 50 - 100. “You have to fight for yourself to be perceived as equal. “ Thankfully, Elizabeth feels supported by her supervisors. “My superiors everywhere, even at the port have always been supportive of me. They said that...

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....

A guide to handling problems at any international frontier might usually entail tips on how to complete a form and a reference guide to import taxes and regulations. But in Burundi, the assistance has been taken a whole lot further with a guide on how to avoid confrontational body language when women traders, the bedrock of cross border trade, deal with customs and tax officials. Laid out in cartoon-style diagrams, the guide is one of many innovative ways Search for Common Ground (SFCG), an international NGO, is helping ordinary people adapt to the realities of trade now that one of Africa’s smallest states is now a member of one of Africa’s biggest trade blocs, the East African Community (EAC). “Our aim is to help women traders improve their position in the new realities of EAC membership, and that means helping them understand today’s realities of paying taxes and duties and dealing with officials without getting into rows,” says Floride Ahintungiye, Programme Director of SFCG, “It starts with just simple things, like learning that finger pointing immediately sets your interlocutor on the defensive. It’s amazing how much progress you can make when you start off with the right attitude of working together to solve problems.” As the EAC grows and becomes more streamlined, borders become the interface not just between member states but EAC citizens, women notably, struggling to come to terms with the new realities of tariffs, duties and procedures EAC rules mandate. Signs posted along major roads in Burundi...

One of TradeMark Africa’s (TMA) objectives, towards its ultimate goal of reducing poverty by increasing trade in East Africa, is improved cross border processes for small traders, especially women. Empowering women in the East African Community as part of the regional integration process is essential to TMA’s goal of improving business competitiveness. Its long-term aim is, through policy change, to eliminate barriers that affect women in trade. In Uganda, TMA is contributing to this by advocating for policy change that will assist women cross border traders and by building capacity, specifically through women’s organisations. “Women need help because of their historic marginalisation”, said iCON Programme Director, Ben Matsiko Kahunga. “They need both confidence and means. If a woman is processing and packaging juice what does she need to cross borders? How does she access quality certification? How can she get advice about packaging, branding and standards?” That is a question that had never occurred to Esther Kabengano, a 37 year old mother of two, living in the Ugandan capital Kampala, where she runs a small business processing and selling fruit juice. She was just too busy trying to survive. By any standards, Kabengano’s business is small, operating from her home where she makes 10 litres of juice at a time (10 litres being the size of the container she uses to hold it) and which she sells on the streets of Kampala by the cupful. Her profit is Ush 4,000 per day - about US$1.5. The profits are not enough...

They are as much a feature of Africa’s borders as immigration officials, barbed wire and bureaucracy. They are the service stations of Africa’s highways and the pit stops of commerce from Cape Town to Cairo. They gravitate to the frontiers where trucks stop, truckers break and travelers take on food and water for their journeys. Their shop fronts are brimming baskets and their cash registers are pockets and purses. They are the women traders who make a living by selling wares at Africa’s myriad borders and TradeMark Africa (TMA) is helping them to get organized, to know their rights and to reap the fruits of East African (EA) integration. “As cross border traders we carry the ignition key to transform our communities,” said Hadijja Sserwanga, a champion of the rights of Uganda’s border traders, regional Chairperson of the East African Women Cross Borders Traders Association (EAWCBTA). She describes herself as a politician, activist, teacher and community development worker fighting to overturn the sexual harassment, exploitation and marginalization by the (largely male) people who run and operate EA borders. She’s been a border trader herself since 1987, operating on the Uganda-Tanzania frontier at Mutukula, and has seen and experienced the problems women traders run into by not knowing their rights under EA integration or being bamboozled into paying unnecessary fines, taxes and bribes because they don’t know better. “I have a lot of passion for women’s empowerment and being a cross border trader. I feel we can transform ourselves from being...

They sneak across the border back to Burundi, putting one foot quietly in front of the other on unmarked forest trails and secret tracks. The enemy is the authority. The goal is tax evasion. And the reason is ignorance. These are the women traders of Burundi who risk the wrath of the law to escape paying taxes on the food and small goods they carry in their nylon baskets from Uganda or Rwanda to sell to ready customers in border villages and further afield. It is much the same story across much the East African Community (EAC) – women traders running needless risks because of rumour and misinformation about punitive border taxes, expensive permits and baffling bureaucracy. “Women traders are the ones who face, every day, the problems of not knowing what their rights are in today’s EAC,” said Burundi’s minister for East African Community Affairs Hafsa Mossi. “Most of them haven’t a clue about their rights or their obligations.” With support from TradeMark Africa (TMA) that situation is changing. Partnering with NGOs, the government and the media, the borderline informal sector is learning that much of what they feared held no threat, and that clarity on tax obligations and paperwork can make their lives, and their profits much better. “Women traders are at the front line in disputes with the authorities at the borders,” said Floride Ahintungiye, Programme Director of the International NGO Search for Common Ground (SFCG). “With help from TradeMark Africa (TMA) our staff went to the...