A Cabanga Africa Publication
Africa Thinks Here
On-the-ground business intelligence in South Africa & Eswatini, since July 2019.
Section
The Southern African Development Community has spent close to three decades writing protocols that describe a single regional market: the 1996 Protocol on Trade, the SADC Free Trade Area launched in 2008, and successive strategic plans committing member states to...
A regional qualifications framework is only as strong as the sixteen national systems it asks to converge. That is the contradiction sitting inside SADC's approach to industrial skills: the architecture for comparable qualifications exists on paper, and the...
A regional bloc can publish a strategy without anyone outside its secretariat knowing what it actually commits member states to do. That is the quiet contradiction sitting inside the Southern African Development Community's documentary record as it stands on 25...
A regional bloc that governs sixteen member states through consensus faces a structural problem long before it faces an implementation problem: which of its own frameworks are actually operative, and which are aspirational text carried forward from summit to summit....
SADC's founding economic logic has always rested on a sequencing claim: peace and security first, integration second. The claim is stated plainly in the bloc's own planning documents, but it has rarely been tested in real time, in public, with a named...
Every regional bloc that publishes a ten-year strategic plan faces the same structural problem: the plan must bind sixteen sovereign governments to a common direction while none of them formally cedes the authority to act unilaterally. SADC's Vision 2050 and its...
Two heads of state signed off on the same claim of progress, and that claim is not, on its own, evidence that SADC's governing framework is operating as designed. The 40th SADC Summit Brochure, published on 16 August 2020 by the SADC Secretariat in partnership...
The Southern African Development Community talks about climate alignment in sweeping terms — regional coordination, global commitments, resilience across sectors — but the instrument actually doing the aligning is not a climate treaty at all. It is the Regional...
A regional bloc of fifteen member states, each with its own telecommunications regulator, cybersecurity legislation and digital-economy priorities, has just written connectivity into its shared ten-year plan as though the hardest part were agreeing on the goal rather...