A Cabanga Africa Publication
Africa Thinks Here
On-the-ground business intelligence in South Africa & Eswatini, since July 2019.
Section
Every regional bloc accumulates instruments faster than it implements them, and the Southern African Development Community is no exception. By August 2019 SADC had, on paper, a Protocol on Finance and Investment dating to 2006, a Protocol on Trade in Services from...
A regional bloc that has produced a founding treaty, two generations of a regional indicative strategic development plan, a strategic indicative plan for its political and security organ, and dozens of sector protocols ought to be easy to audit. It is not. The...
Regional blocs love the word "harmonisation." It implies rules that already exist quietly agreeing with one another. The Southern African Development Community's broadband and ICT integration dialogue, as documented in the public record as of 20...
Fourteen of SADC's fifteen member states now sit inside a single, shared payment-settlement rule set, and one does not. That single exception, Comoros, is the detail that turns this month's confirmation of a multi-currency real-time gross settlement platform...
A regional bloc can adopt a theme in a single afternoon in Windhoek and take a decade to make it binding in Maputo, Lilongwe or Windhoek itself. That is the structural puzzle underneath the 38th Ordinary Summit of the Southern African Development Community, held this...
A regional industrial strategy is only as effective as the public's understanding of it. SADC approved its Industrialization Strategy and Roadmap 2015-2063 in Harare in April 2015, a forty-eight-year framework meant to shift the bloc from raw-material exporter to...
A qualification earned in one Southern African Development Community member state is, in principle, a qualification any employer in the bloc should be able to read and trust. In practice, a diploma from a technical college in one country has often meant retraining,...
Regional blocs tend to accumulate strategy documents faster than they implement them, and the 37th SADC Summit offers a clean specimen of the pattern worth studying on its own terms. This week in Pretoria, South Africa's President Jacob Zuma took over the SADC...
SADC likes to describe itself as a single regional market in formation. Its own summit paperwork tells a more precise story: of thirty-three protocols the bloc has drafted since its founding treaty, twenty-six are legally in force and seven are not — and the seven...