China's massive export engine sputtered for the second year in a row in 2016, with shipments falling in the face of persistently weak global demand and officials voicing fears of a trade war with the United States that is clouding the outlook for 2017. In one week, China's leaders will see if President-elect Donald Trump makes good on a campaign pledge to brand Beijing a currency manipulator on his first day in office, and starts to follow up on a threat to slap high tariffs on Chinese goods. Even if the Trump administration takes no concrete action immediately, analysts say the specter of deteriorating U.S.-China trade and political ties is likely to weigh on the confidence of exporters and investors worldwide. The world's largest trading nation posted gloomy data on Friday, with 2016 exports falling 7.7 percent and imports down 5.5 percent. The export drop was the second annual decline in a row and the worst since the depths of the global crisis in 2009. It will be tough for foreign trade to improve this year, especially if the inauguration of Trump and other major political changes limit the growth of China's exports due to greater protectionist measures, the country's customs agency said on Friday. "The trend of anti-globalization is becoming increasingly evident, and China is the biggest victim of this trend," customs spokesman Huang Songping told reporters. "We will pay close attention to foreign trade policy after Trump is inaugurated president,” Huang said. Trump will be sworn in on...

  Last week’s arrival of the first batch of the Standard Gauge Railway (SGR) locomotives has done little to quell public debate on whether Kenya really got value for money. The jury is also still out on the number of hours it will take to shuttle between Nairobi and Mombasa, with opinion divided on the maximum speed of both the passenger and freight trains. While Ethiopia’s electric train attracted much fanfare, Kenya’s diesel engine locomotives were welcomed last Monday with mockery, likening them to century-old trains. A random search online shows that the Dongfeng 11 (DF11) model was produced between 1992 and 2005, with a total of 459 units having been made.Transport experts say train journeys are nothing new in Kenya, with East Africa Shuttles and safaris putting the number of travellers who have travelled between Nairobi and Mombasa in the past 10 years at more than 2,000. However, the journey usually takes 17 hours over the narrow gauge railway, the only consolation being the a relaxed view through the scenic Tsavo National park. ALSO READ: It's all systems go as Mombasa port gears up for SGR locomotives arrival The arrival of the Dongfeng 11 (DF11) diesel locomotives has created a buzz with the expectation that they will halve the time it takes to travel by road - which is the most preferred means of transport for many Kenyans - to four hours, an immense improvement on the 17 hours by rail by any standard. Not everybody, however, is optimistic...

IN SUMMARY Last year, EAC Council of Ministers did not formulate any proposals to be adopted. Kenya is now banking on the Council of Ministers who will convene in a fortnight to persuade its regional partners to finalise discussions on the ratification of the EPA by the February 2 deadline. The East African Community Heads of State Summit, which was to be held in the first week of this month, has been pushed to next month, after the regional ministers of trade and East African affairs failed to agree on some of the issues to be ratified, top among them being the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the European Union. This has caused anxiety in Kenya, which is now banking on the EAC Council of Ministers who will convene in a fortnight to persuade its regional partners to finalise discussions on the ratification of the EPA by the February 2 deadline. “The ministers have been having back-and-forth discussions over these issues since November. Had the ministers agreed on the issues, then we would have seen a Heads of State Summit later this month, at which the EPA signing would have been timely because of the European Union deadline,” a source said. “However, this wasn’t the case, and the Ministers will now meet in the week of January 23.” East African Community Affairs Principal Secretary Betty Maina confirmed that the summit will take place in February, because the council did not finish its business last year and has therefore not formulated...

Activists are working tirelessly for an East African Community (EAC) gender barometer, a lobby and advocacy tool measuring implementation of gender equality commitments by partner states, to be set up. According to Elizabeth Ampairwe, the coordinator for women and girls’ empowerment at the Eastern African Sub-Regional Support Initiative for the Advancement of Women (EASSI), they are “in the final stages” and working towards having it published by end of February before a regional meeting is held to launch it in April. “We started with country reports, and then moved on to consolidate the reports for a comparative analysis. Key advocacy issues will be picked and policy briefs produced once the process is finalised,” Ampairwe told Sunday Times from Kampala, Uganda. “The purpose is to generate evidence for holding leaders accountable on gender equality.” The inspiration of the EAC gender barometer comes from the work done by the Southern African Development Community (SADC), a 15-member grouping of southern African states. Gender Links, a Southern African NGO committed to gender equality reportedly helped champion the SADC project. “They successfully advocated for a SADC gender protocol and they do annual assessments through a SADC gender barometer. They came to Uganda and trained us to spearhead the EAC process which is a replica,” she said. Ampairwe said donors are interested in taking the same agenda to West Africa, and that the AU is already looking for a continental gender barometer. “This process has a big future and the sustainability is almost assured,” she said....

Supported by the African Agri Council, and hosted by Hypenica, the inaugural Agri Logistics and e-Agri East Africa Summits 2017 are taking place in Nairobi, Kenya from 28 February to 1 March 2017. A delegation of international ICT, logistics and transport infrastructure professionals, together with a line-up of East African agricultural thought leaders, will address the challenges faced by the agricultural sector in the region and to look at ways to unlock the region’s potential. Growing trade volumes in the East African region provides both opportunities and challenges for the agriculture sector. Perishable products often suffer from supply-chain delays and post-harvest losses in remote areas, mostly due to poor infrastructure, lack of appropriate transport systems and a lack of refrigerated transport and storage. Furthermore, the innovative utilisation of African-appropriate technologies and solutions for improved production and increased productivity is often neglected. According to Nico Loretz, Programme Manager, the Agri Logistics and e-Agri East Africa Summits 2017, “It is against this background that the African Agri Council and Hypenica are hosting these two co-located events: It is the only platform of its kind in Africa that brings together proven innovative e-agriculture solutions for preventing post-harvest losses, improved production and increased productivity to improve the supply chain process from farmer to market and to enhance food security in the region.” The joint keynote plenary session, chaired by Ali Mufuruki, Chairman, TradeMark Africa (TMA) and CEO of Infotech Investment Group Ltd will look at a regulatory framework, opportunities in trade agreements, investment needs...

East African Community (EAC) states cannot collectively or individually afford to neglect the development of their manufacturing sector, a UN official has said. In his publication on the challenges of industrialisation within the EAC, Andrew Mold, officer-in-charge of the Sub-regional Office for Eastern Africa (SRO-EA) of the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (ENECA), says the best option for the development of EAC industry is to focus on both ‘recapturing domestic markets’ and simultaneously exploiting better the potential of regional markets.” He observes that there are indeed a lot of promising developments across the region that could potentially facilitate greater industrial and manufacturing production. Speaking to The New Times, yesterday,, Mold said the research paper tries to acknowledge the difficulty in terms of industrialisation in the East African Community, adding that the EAC does not have the budget “to make things happen” but individual countries do. “All five countries are suffering similar constraints in terms of industrialisation. The way forward is not the international market but they need to look more at the regional market, including the wider region such as the market in DR Congo,” he said. The EAC industrialisation strategy – whose vision is a globally competitive, environment-friendly and sustainable industrial sector, capable of significantly improving the living standards of the people of East Africa by 2032 – identifies sectors in which the region has potential. However, the paper indicates that the principal problem is that the region on its own has no way of implementing the policies...

The year 2014 started on a good note in the annals of EAC integration. This is because it started with a new travel experience for EAC citizens. This is the use of the national Identity Card as an authentic travel document between Uganda, Kenya and Rwanda. The development was a result of initiatives agreed upon under the Northern Corridor Integration Projects (NCIP). The NCIP started as a tripartite engagement of three Presidents, Yoweri Museveni (Uganda), Paul Kagame (Rwanda) and Uhuru Kenyatta (Kenya) at Entebbe, Uganda on June 25, 2013, to discuss how to co-operate and expedite implementation of commitments agreed upon under the EAC arrangement. It was initially meant to speed up the flow of cargo, construction of the Standard Gauge Railway, crude oil pipeline and refined petroleum products pipeline. It later, however, expanded to include extra clusters that handle ICT, Oil Refinery, Political Federation, Financing, Power Generation, Transmission and Interconnectivity, Commodity Exchanges, Human Resource Capacity Building and Land.  In addition, there are also Clusters that handle Immigration, Trade, Tourism, Labour and Services, Single Customs Territory, Mutual Defence Cooperation, Mutual Peace and Security Cooperation and Airspace Management. It was against this background that the three Heads of State agreed to recognise the National Identity Card as a travel document within the EAC in addition to the national passports and the EAC passport. (The EAC passport has since been upgraded to a new generation e-passport to replace national passports and its issuance has been planned to commence this year). Thus, in...

Foreign Affairs secretary Amina Mohamed has said abolishing travel visas in the continent will be among her top priorities in her latest bid to head the African Union Commission (AUC). Ms Mohamed said she would also address the infrastructure gap, defend industrialisation and encourage intra-Africa trade if elected AUC chairperson. “We need to remove bottlenecks such as visas,” she said, adding she would push for free movement of goods and services across states. The minister is competing with candidates from Botswana, Chad, Equatorial Guinea and Senegal for the AUC job. In July, the African Union’s 54 members unveiled a single continental visa intended to grant citizens easy access to all member states. Some of the common electronic passports were issued to heads of state and senior officials at the AU summit in Kigali with bloc officials saying all citizens would get them by 2020. Ms Mohamed has lined up expediting the common visa distribution, industrialisation and fixing infrastructure gap as key planks of her campaign. “Industrialisation can reduce poverty and create jobs while trade is unifying factor, but we need to fill our infrastructure gaps and facilitate the mobility of people, capital and goods so that our young people can move across borders, exchange ideas, but also find jobs,” she said during a CNBC TV interview. “The 13 per cent intra-African trade is unacceptable. We should at least reach 30 per cent and eventually aim at 60 per cent. “Africa has to stop exporting raw products and jobs while our...

University students from the East African region will be able to transfer credits from one university to another within the five member states of the East African Community from February, if the region’s heads of state endorse a plan to create a common higher education area. Under the proposal presented in a harmonisation document by the community’s higher education body, the Inter-University Council of East Africa, and already approved by education ministers of the trading bloc, students will be able to move from any of the more than 100 public and private universities in the region at any stage of learning, without having to sit a special entry examination. The community, with an estimated population of 150 million citizens, consists of Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi and is in the process of admitting a new member, Africa’s youngest state, South Sudan. “Under the proposed harmonised higher education framework, student mobility will be made seamless enabling learners to move from one institution to the other at will,” said Cosam Chawanga, IUCEA’s head of quality assurance. Universities in the region will recognise qualifications from any chartered university and from every programme accredited by individual higher education authorities in the countries of origin, said Chawanga. The creation of a common higher education region was slated to have been completed in 2016 but bureaucratic procedures delayed the process, the officer noted. Last December though, education ministers met in Arusha, Tanzania, the bloc’s headquarters, and approved the proposed harmonisation document ahead of February’s heads of state summit...

Experts confirm potential of the Programme for Infrastructure Development in African (PIDA) to contribute jobs and GDP growth When the Lamu Port, South Sudan, Ethiopia Transport Corridor Project (LAPSSET) won the prestigious Global Infrastructure Leadership Forum Award in Washington DC on March 10, 2016, the project was up against equally critical multi-billion dollar programmes including Mexico City New International airport and Seine-Nord Europe Canal, connecting northern European countries such as Belgium, Germany and the Netherlands. LAPSSET’s award in the job creation category honours leaders “driving the next generation’s most transformative global infrastructure projects.” Since inception in 2012, LAPSSET has created an estimated 5,000 direct jobs for the 500- kilometre road between Isiolo in Kenya and Moyale, a market town on the border of Ethiopia and Kenya. Opportunities in engineering designs around the Port of Lamu, banking, telecommunications, and energy generation are still available. LAPSSET, a flagship project of the Programme for Infrastructure Development in African (PIDA) and highlighted at the 2016 PIDA week has set the path. Once completed the project is anticipated to inject 2 to 3% in Kenya’s GDP but also position the country as an economic hub in East Africa. We are convinced that the 51 priority projects identified under PIDA in the areas of energy, transport, ICT and trans-boundary water will follow suit. Creating productive jobs remains a key challenge in sub-Saharan Africa where nine out of ten workers in both rural and urban areas are estimated to hold only informal jobs (ILO, 2009). By 2050,...