North-South time release study: documents, data and chronology for regional operators

February 7, 2025

Advertise Here | By Cabanga Africa Group

Most regional trade stories are told through a single press release and left there. The Report of the Time Release Study (TRS), launched by SADC's Secretariat on 7 February 2025 in Harare, has a longer paper trail than most, and reconstructing it accurately matters for anyone who needs to cite this development with precision rather than approximate memory of "SADC did something on customs." What follows is the documented chronology and evidentiary base behind the launch, built strictly from the record available on the launch date itself.

The tension for a newsroom archive is that regional institutional announcements often compress years of technical work into a single-day headline, obscuring exactly which parts of the record are new on the date of publication and which have existed, unremarked, for months or years already. Getting that distinction right is the difference between an accurate chronology and a misleading one.

The instrument: what the Trade Facilitation Programme actually is

The TRS was conducted under SADC's Trade Facilitation Programme (TFP), which SADC's own launch announcement describes as endorsed by the SADC Ministerial Task Force on Regional Economic Integration in March 2016, and comprising 28 activities in total, of which the TRS is described as "a critical component." The TFP is financed by the European Union; separate SADC documentation on the programme records a Contribution Agreement signed in August 2019 with a budget of €15 million, covering an operational period running from 2019 through 2024, and administered by the SADC Secretariat across all sixteen SADC member states.

That funding and governance architecture predates this specific TRS launch by several years, and readers should not mistake the 7 February 2025 announcement for the programme's commencement — it is a specific deliverable within a programme that was, by the time of this launch, already at or near the end of its originally defined five-year window [TK, exact TFP closure status as of this date not confirmed].

The methodology and its validation timeline

The TRS applied the World Customs Organisation's Time Release Study methodology, an internationally standardised electronic-system approach to measuring how long it takes goods to clear a border post from arrival to release. According to SADC's account, the underlying study methodology and data collection involved customs and trade experts together with supply chain stakeholders from port and border agencies across the four participating states, with expert validation from SADC member states recorded as having occurred in March 2024 — meaning the substantive technical work behind this report was completed and internally reviewed nearly a year before its public launch.

That gap between validation and public release is itself a documentable fact worth preserving in the record: it indicates a period of roughly eleven months between the study's technical sign-off and its formal public presentation, a lag whose cause — administrative, diplomatic or logistical — is not explained in the available source material [TK].

The geographic and institutional scope, precisely stated

For the avoidance of ambiguity in future citation, the corridor studied runs from the port of Durban in South Africa to the Kasumbalesa border post on the Zambia-DRC frontier, with Beitbridge border post and Chirundu One Stop Border Post specifically named as additional checkpoints along the route. Four SADC member states participated directly: South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo. The stated objective, in SADC's own words, was to evaluate "efficiency in the clearance of goods at major sea ports and border posts" and "the cost of doing business at key entry points."

Any future reporting that describes this study should specify these four states and three named border facilities precisely, rather than referring generically to "the SADC region," since the study's findings — whatever they eventually show in detail — apply specifically to this corridor and these facilities, not to SADC's other transport corridors.

What the source record does and does not establish

The available contemporaneous record, drawn from SADC's own launch announcement and its Trade Facilitation Programme documentation, establishes the fact of the launch, its date and location, the programme and funding architecture behind it, the participating states and named border posts, the methodology used, and the validation date. It does not, in the material available at launch, establish the specific measured clearance-time figures at any individual border post, nor any specific recommendations arising from the study, nor any implementation timeline or budget for acting on its findings [TK — all reserved for a separately dated follow-up story once disclosed].

Newsrooms and analysts citing this development should therefore treat the 7 February 2025 record as an announcement of the report's existence and launch, not as a source for specific performance data that has not yet been made public.

What comes next

The chronology's next entry will be whichever document — a data annex, a ministerial response, an implementation plan — makes the TRS's specific findings and recommendations public. Until that document exists and is dated, any figure attributed to the study beyond what is recorded here should be treated with caution.

For archivists and analysts building a reference file on SADC's North-South Corridor trade facilitation work, the actionable next step is to monitor SADC's Trade Facilitation Programme project page and Secretariat communications for the follow-up document, and to log its publication date precisely once it appears, maintaining the same chronological discipline applied here.