It’s a busy lunchtime at the Grand Legacy Hotel in Kigali and Vincent Safari, Technical Adviser with TradeMark Africa (TMA) in Rwanda, is attending a meeting of Central Corridor member states. The Central Corridor is a transport highway used by trucks to carry goods between the port of Dar es Salaam and the states of Burundi, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda. Vincent Safari is attending the meeting not only as a TMA technical advisor, but also as coordinator of the Rwandan National Monitoring Committee on non-tariff barriers, a group made up of representatives from the government, private sector and civil society and chaired by the Ministry of Trade and Industry. Safari explains that although Rwanda has had a National Monitoring Committee since 2008, it was not effective because there was no national strategy in place to eliminate non-tariffs barrier (NTBs) and no full-time coordinator. In 2011 TMA became involved, assisting the Ministry of Trade and Industry to revamp the National Monitoring Committee so that it could become a driving force to eliminate NTBs at both national and regional level. “Before TMA got involved it used to take about 15 to 17 days to get to Kigali from either Dar es Salaam or Mombasa,” explains Safari. “Now from Dar it is between three and six days. And from Mombasa between five and seven days.” This significant reduction was achieved through a series of major interventions that emanated from partnerships between TMA and East Africa’s governments, including Rwanda....

Faustini a father of six is a coffee farmer in Rwanda. He has been growing coffee for 20 years. He started with 200 trees he inherited from his father who was a traditional coffee smallholder. In 2005, at a time when a coffee-drinking culture was rapidly expanding across the globe, the Musassa Coffee Co-operative was formed in Ruli District - located in Rwanda’s verdant hills, a slow and steep two-hour drive from Kigali. The establishment of the cooperative represented a promise of access to markets and this encouraged Faustine to take coffee growing more seriously. He increased his trees to 1700 and over time hired extra help of 5 workers. Musassa Coffee Co-operative represents 2,000 smallholder coffee farmers, 60% of them women. The farmers take their beans to designated collection points in the district from where they are delivered to the washing station, for washing, drying and grading. Almost all Rwandan coffee is exported in the green (unroasted) state because the buyers prefer to roast it themselves, sometimes blending it with other coffee types from various origins. “My life improved very well,” he says, “before we had so many problems related to production and management of coffee trees. The co-op came with solutions in the form of efficient supply chain and now we are making more money.” Faustini has done well over the 11 years he has been part of the Musassa co-operative. While his father lived in a house made of mud, Faustini’s is brick and has electricity. His...

Laurent Demuynck has a passion for mushrooms. He calls them “the meat of the poor” because of their high nutritional value. As founder and CEO of Kigali Farms, a Kigali based mushroom processing company, he wants to see Africa catch up with the rest of the world when it comes to growing mushrooms. In fact, he has a vision that in 10 to 15 years, thousands of people in Africa, maybe hundreds of thousands, will be making an income from mushrooms. Kigali Farms is one of 21 Rwandan food and agricultural companies that have recently benefited from global training, known as HACCP, that ensures standards in food safety are reached and maintained. HACCP, or Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Point, is an effective tool to prevent biological, chemical and physical contamination of food, and should eventually lead to a company receiving widely accepted certification. Funded in Rwanda by TradeMark Africa (TMA) and implemented by the British Standards Institution (BSI) in partnership with the Rwanda Standards Board (RSB), the HACCP training aims to provide safety in every part of the food chain from the farmer, to the processor, to the retailer, through to the final consumed product. For the food producers of Rwanda, HACCP certification is one more step towards the coveted goal of exporting their products to the East African Community and beyond. Exports are critical to reducing Rwanda’s trade deficit, yet until recently it had limited scope to test products for mycotoxin (fungal infection) contamination. Instead, they were sent...

In order to achieve the Economic Development and Poverty Reduction Strategy (EDPRS2) and 2020 Vision’s objective to commercialize and diversify agriculture, the Government of Rwanda has been involved in promoting trade in different crops by creating a conducive environment to facilitate the export of these key agriculture products but also by ensuring Rwandan products get access to potentially lucrative foreign markets. Honey for export Previous reports on the honey sector have been for some time highlighting the export potential for Rwandan honey and other bee products. The quality of the Rwandan honey and wax was considered good and it was evident that it could meet the quality standards and specifications of foreign markets In this respect, honey was considered as one of the products to be promoted both regionally and internationally. In Rwanda, honey production has been considered for a long time as a past-time activity carried out by older men and in many respects has been neglected. Information on apiculture was scattered and most of what was available amongst various sector stakeholders were merely assumptions due to the lack of data and a well-defined monitoring and evaluation system. In the recent past, however, apiculture (the rearing of bees for commercial purposes), has been brought to the forefront, playing an increasingly significant role in transforming the lives of former gatherers of honey at a very small scale into farmers complying to national and international standards at every level in the production chain towards export. “Although the government puts in a...

Abdul Mohamed is a small business owner based in Dar es Salaam Tanzania. He owns and drives his own truck, which he uses to export plastic chairs to neighbouring Burundi. On Tuesday 9 September 2014 Abdul leaves Dar es Salaam at 7.00 AM carrying almost 2,000 chairs bound for a retailer in Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi. The following day at 1.00 PM after 30 hours on the road, Abdul arrives at the border post of Kobero, just inside Burundi territory. Abdul Mohamed has been exporting chairs to Burundi for the last three years, a five-day return journey covering nearly 2,400 Km. He has made good time on this journey and he expects to spend up to four hours at the border post before getting back behind the wheel and on the road. But it wasn’t always so. Just four months before, Abdul would have had to make the same journey with two border stops, the first at Kabanga on the Tanzanian side of the border, then at Kobero. The procedure was lengthy. Abdul would, through the services of a clearing agent, declare his goods to the customs officers who would make a physical inspection of his cargo. That could take up to 12 hours as he waited in line with the many other truck drivers who use the central corridor to carry goods inland from the port of Dar es Salaam. Then, having completed that procedure, Abdul would go through immigration procedures before finally being allowed into the...

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...

The five Partner States of the East African Community (EAC) are currently involved in activities related to the conformity of products traded within the region. The process which includes the preparation, approval and adoption of the standards related to those products is undertaken by the different national standards bodies in each one of the partner states. A common definition of a standard is a document approved by a recognized body that provides for common and repeated use rules, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and production methods, for which compliance may or may not be mandatory. Standards play an important role in regional integration. “Standards are vital to integration,” says José Maciel, Director of Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs) and Standards at TradeMark Africa (TMA). “In addition to safeguarding the health and safety of the consumers and the environment, standards can cut the cost and time of doing business by huge amounts. In that sense, they are central to the future wealth of the EAC.” All across the five-nation regional economic bloc, TMA is helping national partners harmonize the standards of the most commonly traded goods in the region so that they can cross borders unimpeded by questions about their authenticity or reliability or origin. These include some of the most-traded goods in the EAC such as tea, coffee, iron, petroleum and edible fats and oils. TMA is assisting the EAC national bureaus of standards, the private sector and the EAC Secretariat on two levels: national and regional. At the...

Rwandan food producers are submitting themselves to the most stringent of global tests –good enough even for astronauts in space - to get a stamp of approval that will enhance their standing in world markets and help increase badly-needed exports. “This certification has increased consumer confidence and our confidence too,” says Dative Giramahoro, of Sosoma Ltd, which mills maize. “We sell in Kenya’s Nakumatt supermarket in Kigali, so now there is no reason why we cannot sell to any Nakumatt in Kenya,” she says. The certification is part of a programme overseen by the Rwandan Bureau of standards (RBS) to help the local food industry eat into the country’s 4-1 trade deficit with the rest of the world by increasing exports to the East African Community (EAC) and beyond. “There is no doubt that the certification we have received will help us increase exports and we see the European Union (EU) and Canada as primary targets, even the United States,” says, Anna Uwiganza, head of Kinazi Cassava Plant ltd. The standards are out of this world. They were pioneered by the U.S. Pilsbury Company, the U.S. army and the U.S. space programme NASA to guarantee the safety of any food that astronauts might consume in space. Called Hazard Analysis and Critical Control Points (HACCP), the system is a set of preventive analyses to prevent bacteria getting into the food chain at every point from harvests to packaging and is the most widely used food safety standard in the world today....

Mombasa-Kampala-Kigali Highway It’s 1,200 km from the Kenyan port of Mombasa to the Ugandan capital, Kampala and another 525 to the capital of Rwanda, Kigali. But with a few strokes of the politicians’ pens and some clicks on a mouse, that distance just got dramatically shorter. “It used to take 18 days or more for one of our trucks to get here from Mombasa,” said Kassim Omar, Chairman of the Uganda Clearing Industry and Forwarding Association (UCIFA). “Now the same journey takes four days, sometimes even three.” The reduction is due to the decision at a Northern Corridor infrastructure summit by the Presidents of Kenya, Rwanda and Uganda to speed rapidly growing freight along their key trade route and the implementation of a variety of hi-tech systems that have slashed paperwork and time. The combination has stripped away a lot of the bureaucratic red tape that snarled the free flow of trade in the East African Community and contributed to some of the highest transport costs in the world, accounting for up to 40% of the price of goods to consumers. In October 2013, Presidents Yoweri Museveni of Uganda, Paul Kagame of Rwanda and Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya agreed to implement a Single Customs Territory (SCT) between them as members of the East African Community. Tanzania and Burundi, say they followed suit at the Summit in November 2013. At a stroke, the agreement removed multiple weighbridge, police and customs checks along the Mombasa-Kampala-Kigali route and introduced computerised clearance and electronic...

Rwanda’s small trucking industry hasn’t had much to shout about recently, unless it was to complain about interminable roadside delays due to bureaucracy, corruption and paperwork. Until now. Some neat diplomatic footwork with neighbouring Tanzania has given Rwandan truckers some good news in an industry where time is money, costs are high, and margins small and the playing field tilted towards the regional giants and their huge trucking sectors. “Yes, some good news for a change,” says Theodore Murenzi, head of the Rwanda Truckers Association. “Tanzania has dropped a road toll which penalized Rwandan trucks on the central corridor. It’s not 100% good news, but it’s a real start.” A study into the competitiveness of Rwanda’s road freight industry highlighted what Rwandan truckers had long complained about – Tanzania charged Rwandan trucks a $500 transit toll yet Rwanda charged Tanzanian registered trucks only $152, putting Rwanda’s drivers at a $348 disadvantage every return trip and adding to already high costs. Such bureaucratic hurdles to free trade are known as Non Tariff Barriers (NTBs). The EAC is committed to eliminating them altogether, but the process is laborious and the barriers cemented in protectionism. “We registered this as an NTB at the level of the EAC, but the harmonization of the road toll at EAC level is not decided,” says Vincent Safari, head of the National Monitoring Committee on NTBs. “But the study was evidence-based, factual and detailed and we were confident it would succeed, somehow.” After validation of the findings of...