A Cabanga Africa Publication
Africa Thinks Here
On-the-ground business intelligence in South Africa & Eswatini, since July 2019.
Section
A strategy written to run from 2015 to 2063 is, by construction, a document its own authors will never see completed. That is the premise behind the SADC Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap, the framework President Andry Rajoelina invoked when he opened the eighth...
SADC has, on paper, had a trade-facilitation architecture for years: the Protocol on Trade, commitments under the World Trade Organization's Trade Facilitation Agreement, and successive iterations of the Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan. The...
Regional economic communities produce frameworks far more easily than they produce implementation. The Southern African Development Community has, on paper, had a leather sector policy instrument in progress for some time — the SADC Leather Regional Model Policy...
SADC's institutional architecture has a peculiar habit: it keeps building new structures beside old ones rather than finishing the old ones first. At the 34th Committee of Ministers of Trade, held in Harare on 5 June 2025, ministers urged member states to ratify...
SADC governs its industrial ambitions through documents built on a scale that sits awkwardly beside this week's news. The Industrialisation Strategy and Roadmap runs to 2063. The Regional Indicative Strategic Development Plan targets a minimum 7% annual GDP...
At a March 2025 IBCCI event, economist Keith Jefferis pressed for digital training to lift productivity, warning government debt could reach 31 percent of GDP by 2025/26.
Regional trade policy in Southern Africa has long suffered from a specific credibility problem: the protocols are signed, the tariffs are scheduled, and yet nobody can say with precision how much friction actually remains at the border. On 7 February 2025, SADC's...
Southern Africa now belongs, on paper, to three overlapping trade regimes at once: SADC's own Protocol on Trade, COMESA, and — where a member state also sits in the East African Community's orbit — the EAC's rules too. The Tripartite Free Trade Area...
A regional bloc's summit theme is usually read as a headline. It is more useful read as a symptom — a single sentence that reveals which parts of a much larger strategic architecture are receiving political attention in a given year. The 44th SADC Summit, held in...