Reflections from the EU-Kenya Business Forum 2025  At this week’s EU-Kenya Business Forum in Nairobi, TMA’s Director for Digital Trade, Erick Sirali, led a conversation on how digitalisation is transforming customs and trade facilitation. There was an acknowledgement that while Africa has made progress in digitalisation, the work ahead is considerable. We are talking, fragmented systems, redundant processes, and limited data-sharing that continue to hold us back. Africa’s vision for seamless cross-border trade, No Stop Borders, future, that featured heavily in TMA’s Africa Trade Development Forum in Kigali in December 2024, demands fast-tracked reforms that support cross-border data flows and data governance. A compelling real-life example was presented by Billy Ngumi of KenTrade who painted a picture of how things used to be at Moyale, the Kenya–Ethiopia border before the Kenya National Electronic Single Window was implemented. He said that, clearing agents in Moyale would crisscross Marsabit County, collecting customs documents, then travel the 777 kilometres to Nairobi, which fyi, is an 11-hour one-way trip, just to submit paperwork, make payments and get approvals. Then, they’d return to Moyale to deliver the documents to traders. The entire cycle could take over a week, just to move goods from Ethiopia into Kenya. But now, with Kenya National Single Window System, agents can apply, pay and receive approvals online. What once took days, and a road trip now takes minutes and a few clicks. Trade moves faster. Paperwork is instant. And a trader in Moyale doesn’t have to wait for someone to make a cross-country trip to Nairobi. In the real life...

An atmosphere of calm welcomes you as you enter the lobby of the Rwanda Utilities Regulatory Authority (RURA). This wasn’t always the case, according to Francois Gatete, the Director for Information Systems at RURA. Before 2019, RURA, which regulates all public utilities in Rwanda, struggled with the mundane, time-consuming manual processes of issuing out licenses, resulting in a crowded and chaotic lobby. To understand how complicated the scenario was, imagine this: a vendor would initiate a license request, but the finance department, trapped in an information void, couldn’t know, or track the progress of the application. This opaqueness made the process frustrating and inefficient, and many traders would visit RURA offices daily to follow up on the all-important piece of paper. David Butera, Programme Manager, TradeMark Africa (TMA), pointed out that a scoping exercise that sought to identify and resolve trade barriers in Rwanda highlighted RURA as one of the agencies that was still using manual processes; with traders saying this was a big problem that made trading difficult and costly. “We used to have silos in the application chain as there was no way for a team, say, finance to gain visibility on the status of the license application in the pipeline,” Gatete recalls of the disjointed processes. Trying to manually serve over 20,000 businesses led to many deadlocks both for RURA and the businesses. Innocent Twahirwa, who runs Jali Transport, remembers submitting thousands of paper forms and making numerous follow-up visits to RURA offices to get licenses for...

The goods arrive at the port of Mombasa in big, lumbering mysterious ships. They come with impossible names like Kota Gadang, Si Hang Yun, Fox, Tramper. They come sailing under the flags of Singapore, Japan, India, Sierra Leone, Panama, China, bringing in palm oil, sorghum, kapok, coconut, sisal, cotton, vehicles, fertiliser, motorbike parts, sugar etc. They are offloaded at the berths by bigger cranes then more clearing happens as truck drivers await in their trailers in turns, shooting the breeze, watching YouTube skits from their phones as they await the call that will clear them for entry into the port for collection. The port has changed, Jaffer Mukose - a trucker - says. He’s done nothing else since he finished high school in Uganda seventeen years ago. “When I started, everything was manual. You’d run to this office with papers to be signed, then run to another office with the same papers for another signature, then go to another and wait for hours because the signer went for a long lunch.” He chuckles. “The clearance process is much faster now with computers and automation of the processes. The different agencies seem to have reached an agreement and work more harmoniously without unnecessary delays in approvals. For some products destined to Uganda, I can find a Uganda Revenue Authority here, who will clear me such that the next stop is at the border crossing at Malaba. The roads out of the port are less congested as they have been expanded. I...

“Armed men broke his windscreen and started hitting him with an iron bar. They stole the goods he was carrying and left him for dead. By the time help came, it was too late. He had died from excessive bleeding,”-Patrick Mutinda, former Truck driver. East Africa’s Regional Electronic Cargo Tracking system (RECTS) has many benefits some of which include safety of cargo, expedited clearance at borders and reduced dumping. To many long-distance truck drivers, it has assured them of safety on the sometimes-treacherous transport corridors. RECTs is a webbased system that provides a harmonised platform for revenue authorities in Kenya, Uganda, Rwanda to monitor transit cargo from loading to offloading thus curbing cargo dumping, diversion among other risks. Over the years, cargo volume along transport corridor has increased and this raised the need to facilitate quick movement of cargo without compromising customs security controls. That is the well-known story. The untold story is that of long-distance truck drivers ferrying high risk and often in demand goods, whose lives have been saved from armed robbers by the rapid response unit attached to RECTs. Drivers like Mutinda. Mutinda is a former long-distance truck driver. He recalls his perpetual discomfort driving along Kiu, a lonely hilly section of the Mombasa-Nairobi highway near Salama, as the area was known for armed gangsters who attacked cargo trucks. His friend lost his life in one such incidence. “My friend… as his truck slowed down, armed men attacked him, injuring him, and taking off with the goods...

“They are not TBS standards. They are the people’s standards,” Ms. Kezia Mbwambo, the Director of Quality Management at the Tanzania Bureau of Standards (TBS) begins by setting the record straight. Ms. Mbwambo feels it is very important to address the constraint of a misguided public perception about standards and their uses. She does not however feel it is important nor helpful to apportion blame. On behalf of the TBS Director General, she has been leading efforts at the Tanzania Bureau of Standards to make standards work better for Tanzanians with support from TradeMark Africa (TMA). [caption id="attachment_55084" align="alignnone" width="1607"] “There has been slow uptake of standards, this despite the fact that TBS has always used participatory design strategies to come up with these standards, in line with international protocols and requirements for development of national standards,” Ms. Mbwambo says.[/caption] With support from TMA, the bureau is embarking on a process of improving its service delivery mechanisms to its stakeholders. Part of this improvement includes developing a training programme on standardization and quality assurance, mainly targeting micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) using both paper-based and digital platforms. The bureau is also developing an Integrated Standardization, Quality assurance, Metrology and Testing (SQMT) system that will automate the key administrative processes used to offer services to its stakeholders. For TBS, this is expected to quicken the process of certifying products and expand the base of products that have met standards. For many entrepreneurs with dreams to do well in the country,...

Bureaucratic delays related to standards certification almost led Michael Kimeu* to give up on his ambitions to set up a bottled water business in early 2010’s. Kimeu set up a water distillation and bottling plant on the outskirts of Kajiado, a county to the south west of Kenya’s capital Nairobi. However, he knew that he could not embark on his new venture without his product acquiring certification from the Kenya Bureau of Standards (KEBS). The certification is a mandatory requirement for all locally manufactured products before they are shipped to markets locally or even regionally. It is issued to a firm as confirmation that a product conforms to requirements set by the Bureau. As soon as his equipment was installed and first product samples generated, Kimeu lodged his application for a permit. Almost half a year later, he was yet to receive the permit and attempts to follow up led to frustration. The delay had a negative impact on his business as supermarkets and other retailers could not stock his product without the KEBS mark of quality. It is an offence under the Standards Act Cap 496 of the laws of Kenya to offer a product for sale without a valid standard mark of quality. To keep his business active, Kimeu altered his initial plans and set up a small-scale water-refilling business, awaiting the KEBS license. "The kin d of investment I had made could not be recouped by the new strategy and I found that I was running into...

Mariam Babu, 43, a mother of five and grandmother to two who sells eggs in Kenya and salt in Uganda via the Busia border town, is not the image that springs to mind when you think of a smuggler. Yet when she recalls her time bringing in products from Kenya into Uganda through abandoned bush routes in the dead of the night, around 10 years ago, that is the word she chooses to describe herself. [caption id="attachment_55075" align="alignnone" width="640"] “Don’t get me wrong. We were not bringing in dangerous contraband,” she notes, “it was things like rice, wheat flour, and household goods. Yet the process of going through the proper routes at the Busia border, before the One-Stop Border Post was built was too complicated and too difficult for us small traders. The offices we have today didn’t exist. None of us knew where to go to clear our goods, the officers were rude and corrupt, and there was much paperwork to do - it was all so expensive. We never felt welcome at the border!”[/caption] Today, Mariam is the chairwoman of the Women’s Cross Border Traders Cooperative Society. From her office at the Women’s Trade Desk at the Busia One-Stop Border Post (OSBP), she reflects on her decade-long transformation. The changes at the border over the past several years, she says, have not only changed the border but also changed her life. She notes the establishment of the East African Community (EAC) Common Market, the construction of the OSBP...

From commercial to regulatory formalities, export procedures are often burdensome and time consuming for the average businessperson. Small delays in the implementation of any of these or more procedures have the potential to bring serious negative impact on businesses. “Buyers’ minds are often directed at obtaining a quality service or product, and in a timely manner. They are not too empathetic on procedural issues on the suppliers’ side. This burden is the exporters’ and cannot be shifted to anyone else,” explains Octavian Kiviryo, an expert in freight and logistics who has worked with many exporting businesses in Tanzania. Certificates of Origin (CoO) are important and mandatory pieces of documentation for the export business. As the name suggests, CoO details the origin of goods in a consignment. For a long time, a CoO cumbersome procedural requirement slowed down the exporting process from Tanzania. Tanzania Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculture (TCCIA) and Zanzibar National Chamber of Commerce, Industry & Agriculture (ZNCCIA) are the institutions vested with the full mandate of verifying the origin of all goods manufactured or processed in Tanzania for the export market and therefore, the issuance of the Certificates of Origin. For a long time, they used manual process, that was littered with a lot of paper-work and multiple visits by traders to offices. Today, and with support from TradeMark Africa (TMA) the two institutions have adopted an electronic system for application of CoO greatly cutting back on transaction costs and time traders incurred. This is premised on...

Before the Kagera War in 1979, Kirabira George Kamya, now 61, had qualified to be a primary school teacher in his village in South Eastern Uganda. His dream of becoming a headmaster at his childhood school was one of the casualties of the war. He worked as a teacher for two years before the ensuing insecurity and displacement changed everything. Farming was the natural fallback option. Both his parents had been subsistence farmers, and he recalls holding a hoe as soon as he could walk - but their lifelong toil in the farm never lifted them out of poverty. Kirabira says that, at first, he felt that life had forced him to become a farmer. Today, however, he says he is grateful at the turn of events that led him here because of how transformative agriculture has been to his life. Starting in 2015, Kirabira was part of a group of farmers who played a key role in developing the Nakaseke Maize Standards Ordinance (NMSO). The ordinance is a grassroots-led effort to address the issue of maize grain standards - from maize production to its regional distribution. It sets out bylaws and decrees that ensure maize farmers in Nakaseke produce grain that meets the market requirements embedded in the East African Community (EAC) maize grains standard. This allows Nakaseke farmers to trade their maize internationally and grow their livelihoods and businesses. The ordinance’s development and subsequent enforcement was supported and funded by TradeMark Africa (TMA) through its implementing partner: Southern...

Modesta Nekesa, 31, has been a farmer for most of her adult life. However, it was not until two years ago that she started making money from her land by cultivating and selling a crop that was unfamiliar in her community - chilli. Ms. Nekesa lives in Busia, a town on the Kenya-Uganda border where she moved to after getting married at 17. She was widowed at 23 with three children. Her late husband, Michael Oluoch had bequeathed her five acres of land, but inheritance tussles saw half of it taken away by her brothers-in-law. And so, destiny subjected her to a life of subsistence, cultivating maize, beans, and occasionally sweet potatoes. She barter-traded some for other household utilities and the largest portion was consumed by her young family. "We fed off the land, and for years, I never had a shilling to my name. Any little money I got from selling part of my (not-so-good) harvests was immediately spent on books, pencils, uniform repairs or other such immediate needs," she said. All this changed after Ms. Nekesa accepted an invitation from a friend to attend an agriculture seminar organised by the Joyful Women Organization (JOYWO), an implementing partner of TradeMark Africa’s (TMA) Women and Trade programme. This course opened her eyes to a world of farming entrepreneurship. [caption id="attachment_55052" align="alignnone" width="640"] "We fed off the land, and for years, I never had a shilling to my name. Any little honey I got from selling part of my (notso-good) harvests...