A Cabanga Africa Publication
Africa Thinks Here
On-the-ground business intelligence in South Africa & Eswatini, since July 2019.
Section
A trader moving tomatoes from Zambia's Copperbelt to a market in the Democratic Republic of Congo, or a small manufacturer shipping textiles from Zimbabwe into Mozambique, does not experience the Southern African Development Community as a set of summit...
The bank customer sending money across a SADC border has historically experienced regional integration as a wait: two, three, sometimes more days between instructing a payment and having it reflect on the other side. That wait is the contradiction now facing a system...
The Union of the Comoros became SADC's sixteenth member state this month, at the bloc's 38th Summit of Heads of State and Government in Windhoek, and the announcement invites an assumption that regional retailers, e-commerce platforms and consumer-goods...
Walk into a Windhoek supermarket and much of what fills the shelves has crossed the border from South Africa, not off a Namibian production line. That import dependency is the quiet backdrop against which SADC's third Industrialisation Week arrives in the...
A farmer in Chipata can now, in principle, plant a maize variety certified in Lilongwe and sold across the border without a fresh round of national testing. Whether she can actually walk into an agro-dealer and buy it is a separate question, and it is the one that...
A traveller who wants to see Victoria Falls, the Okavango Delta and Kruger National Park on a single trip is, in practical terms, buying a product that does not yet exist as one purchase. She books three countries' worth of visas, converts money into at least two...
Walk into a supermarket in Gaborone, Maputo or Harare and most of the manufactured goods on the shelf did not come from a neighbouring SADC state. Intra-regional trade across the Southern African Development Community sits at around 20% of total trade, which means...
A strategy built to raise manufactured exports to half of the region's outbound trade says almost nothing, on its face, about the shopper in Manzini, Gaborone or Lusaka who currently pays import prices for goods a neighbouring member state could plausibly...
On 10 October 2016, the Economic Partnership Agreement between the European Union and six SADC states — Botswana, Lesotho, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa and Swaziland — entered provisional application. For trade officials and exporters, this is a milestone. For a...