East Africa Enhances Trade with African Development Bank’s Support
By African Development Bank
Published October 27, 2023
East African Community (EAC) Secretariat, United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and African Development Bank (AfDB) have launched a capacity development project to enhance trade in East Africa.
The US$1.56M EAC Trade Portal Enhancement Project will support digitized trade solutions to reduce trade barriers and enable the EAC to meet its obligations under the World Trade Organization (WTO)’s Trade Facilitation Agreement besides addressing the lack of capacity in trade information and ICT systems, insufficient market information, poor internet connectivity and transparency for trade and investment.
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The two-year multi-country trade portal enhancement project, funded by the Multilateral Cooperation Center for Development Finance, was launched during the EAC Donor Round Table held in Arusha, Tanzania on October 6, 2023.
Rachael Nsubuga, Senior Trade Facilitation Officer at African Development Bank, explained that the bank’s trade facilitation programmes are designed to reduce barriers to international trade and facilitate both intra-African and external trade.
“This project will complement other programmes of the African Development Bank in the region by providing digitalized trade solutions and data to support investment climate and customs modernization work,” Nsubuga said.
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The project will leverage partnerships to enhance and integrate existing digital trade information facilitation and customs modernization systems to share intra-regional and extra-regional market information. This will further contribute to the EAC single window goal as well as increased trade with key trading partners like the African Continental Free Trade Area and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations -plus markets. The EAC Trade Portal Enhancement Project is a pilot project that can be a model for the rest of the world.
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“EAC is committed to trade transparency and partnerships in developing regional trade,” said Peter Matuki, Secretary General of EAC Secretariat. “Enabling infrastructure coupled with capacity building can further bolster the region’s trade ecosystem for sustained socio-economic gains.”
The enhanced regional portal will be user-friendly and interactive with measurable online connectivity indicators linked to artificial intelligence tools that feed into other systems such as customs, and EAC’s non-tariff barriers monitoring system. It will be linked with national trade portals to provide real-time assistance on non-tariff barriers and the calculation of trade procedure costs.
