Ministers Francis Mwebesa and Wilson Mbadi (left and second from left) with TMA Uganda Country Director Anna Nambooze and Bagonza (second from right and right) The Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Cooperatives, Uganda, and TradeMark Africa convened 190 participants drawn from government, the private sector, civil society, and international organizations on 26 and 27 March, 2025, to discuss and evaluate the current state of trade in Uganda. The Uganda Trade Review Conference 2025, themed Leveraging Trade: Towards Uganda’s 10-Fold Growth Strategy, focused on identifying challenges and opportunities in the trade sector. The conference aimed to develop actionable strategies to enhance Uganda’s trade performance, foster economic growth, and promote sustainable development by empowering local businesses to access global markets. Participants highlighted export growth and diversification beyond traditional commodities like coffee, tea, and tobacco, now including manufactured goods, processed foods, and minerals. This diversification has increased the need for industrial parks and Special Economic Zones (SEZs) to expand production capacity. Additionally, increased trade agreements within the East African Community (EAC), COMESA, and the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) have significantly boosted market access. Lynette Bagonza, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Trade, Industry, and Cooperatives, emphasized the importance of shifting from raw exports to processed goods that fetch higher prices in international markets. “Our manufacturing program aims to increase manufactured exports from 15 percent in 2021 to 20 percent by 2029. We must ensure our goods meet global standards and are competitive,” she stated. Regarding infrastructure development, participants identified the...

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...