North-South time release study: market impact and regional growth — and what comes next

February 7, 2025

Advertise Here | By Cabanga Africa Group

A tariff line can be reduced to zero and a shipment can still take days to clear a border. That is the contradiction sitting underneath most conversations about African regional trade, and it is the contradiction SADC's Secretariat addressed directly on 7 February 2025, when it launched, in Harare, the Report of the Time Release Study (TRS) covering the North-South Corridor from the port of Durban to the Kasumbalesa border post on the Zambia-DRC frontier. The study is not a new trade agreement. It is a measurement exercise — and in regional trade, measurement is usually the precondition for reform.

The thesis is straightforward: SADC's own preferential trade regime under the Protocol on Trade has existed for years, but its commercial value to an exporter depends less on the tariff schedule than on how long goods sit at Beitbridge, Chirundu and Kasumbalesa before they are released. By formally quantifying that time, under the Trade Facilitation Programme (TFP) financed by the European Union, SADC has converted an anecdotal complaint from freight forwarders into an evidentiary base regional economics can be built on.

Measuring the corridor that carries the region's trade

The North-South Corridor is arguably the single most important trade artery in Southern Africa, linking South Africa's largest container port to landlocked Zambia and the copper-belt economy of the Democratic Republic of Congo. Four member states — South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia and the DRC — participated in the study, which applied the World Customs Organisation's standard Time Release methodology, a globally recognised system for measuring how long it actually takes goods to clear a border post from arrival to release.

SADC's own account of the launch describes the exercise as assessing "efficiency in the clearance of goods at major sea ports and border posts" and "the cost of doing business at key entry points" — language that frames the TRS as an economics exercise as much as a customs one. For a regional manufacturer or trader, the corridor's usable market size is not defined by geography; it is defined by how quickly and predictably goods move through Durban, Beitbridge, Chirundu and Kasumbalesa. A slower, less predictable corridor effectively shrinks the addressable market to whatever a firm can afford to hold in transit inventory.

What the study can and cannot yet tell an exporter

The TRS methodology itself was validated by SADC member state experts as far back as March 2024, meaning the data collection and technical groundwork predate this launch by close to a year. What is new on this date is the public release of the findings and their formal adoption as a reference document under the TFP, which comprises 28 activities across the region's trade facilitation agenda. That distinction matters commercially: a validated methodology tells an operator the numbers are credible; a released report tells an operator the numbers are now actionable as a benchmark.

What the report does not yet establish, on the evidence available at launch, is the specific time-in-hours or time-in-days figure recorded at each border post, nor the precise breakdown between physical inspection delay, documentary processing delay and infrastructure queuing [TK]. Those figures are the ones a logistics planner would ultimately use to reprice a Durban-to-Lubumbashi supply chain, and their public disclosure — if and when it follows — will be the more decisive commercial signal than the launch itself.

A regional operator's read of market opportunity should follow the data, not the announcement.

Where regional growth actually gets tested

SADC's combined intra-regional trade has long underperformed relative to the bloc's combined GDP, and border delay is one of the most commonly cited — if historically under-quantified — reasons why. The TRS gives economists and trade ministries a baseline against which future interventions on the corridor can be measured: if a subsequent infrastructure upgrade or procedural reform at Chirundu One Stop Border Post reduces recorded clearance time, that reduction is now measurable against a documented starting point rather than asserted anecdotally.

This is the quieter but more durable value of the exercise. Regional growth strategies are frequently criticised for lacking baselines against which "progress" can be verified. A Time Release Study, properly used, converts a policy aspiration — faster, cheaper regional trade — into a number that can rise or fall and be reported on again.

The competitiveness question for regional firms

For firms already trading along the corridor, the practical question raised by the TRS launch is whether their own logistics costing reflects the corridor's real clearance performance or an assumption that predates this data. Firms that have priced in generous buffer time for Beitbridge or Kasumbalesa may find, once figures are disclosed, that some of that buffer is now unnecessary — or, alternatively, that it understates the true bottleneck at a specific post. Either finding changes a costing model.

For firms considering entering the corridor for the first time — a Zambian copper-belt manufacturer eyeing a Durban import route, or a South African agro-processor eyeing Congolese demand — the TRS is the first piece of independent evidence they can request before committing capital to a route rather than relying on forwarders' informal estimates.

What comes next

The implementation test that follows a study of this kind is whether its findings translate into a specific reform programme — a border-post staffing change, a joint customs post upgrade, a data-sharing protocol between South African, Zimbabwean, Zambian and Congolese revenue authorities — with a published timeline. None of that detail was available at the time of this launch, and each such reform, if it materialises, will be a separately dated story in its own right.

For now, the operative fact for a regional trader is that the North-South Corridor's performance is, for the first time, formally documented rather than informally assumed. Whether that documentation moves prices, routes or investment decisions depends on what SADC and its member states do with the report next.