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Coming of age: East Africa’s women in export business learn the hard way

Tuesday March 27 2018
women

Women selling grains at St Balikuddembe market in Uganda. TradeMark East Africa is training women cross-border traders in the region on the best practices. PHOTO | MORGAN MBABAZI | NATION

By JULIUS BARIGABA

When Claire Kabakyenga lost a lucrative contract with the World Food Programme in Uganda in 2010, she ventured into the unknown.

Acting on a tip-off from a friend, she tried her hand at exporting grain to Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. She failed at the first attempt.

“What I found at the [Rwanda] border is not what I expected. They were strict on quality; they demanded documents we didn’t know about,” she said.

The budding exporter had moved her produce to the border without two key documents — a sanitary and phytosanitary (SPS) certificate and a certificate of origin (CoO) — issued by the Uganda Export Promotion Board and the Ministry of Agriculture respectively.

“Being new in export business, we had a tough time with border officials. After eight days, they rejected our maize, and I returned with it,” she said.

For Ms Kabakyenga and her group Manyakabi Area Co-operative Enterprise, the first trip in export business returned a loss of Ush8 million ($2,205) but they stayed on. The irony of it all is that the majority of cross-border traders in East Africa are women with goods valued under $1,000.

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Training

Trade experts say most women starting out require training to negotiate market access, get the right quality for different markets and wade through the border processes.

But the pile of documents involved, the codes and jargon are a minefield. Because of this, TradeMark East Africa (TMEA) started a women and trade pilot programme in 2011 to train women exporters at three border points of Katuna, Mutukula and Busia.

By 2014, the programme had expanded to cover seven borders. By the end of 2017, the programme was covering all East African Community partner states, with some 25,000 beneficiaries — some 4,776 of these in Uganda.

Although the majority of the women exporters are in grain trade, Gloria Atuheirwe, the women and trade programme manager at TMEA said that the most successful are in the coffee and textile sectors.

“Some started with less than $10,000 inventory, but in short time have struck deals of $300,000” exporting beyond East Africa,” said Ms Atuheirwe. “We connected them to better markets and buyers in Malaysia, Japan and the US, which take a lot of apparel.”

International trade

That women are coming of age in international trade is key to achieving the Sustainable Development Goal on gender equality through empowerment of women and girls.

This is a development that is not lost on the regional trade facilitation projects like TMEA, and indeed globally, the body that regulates trade, the World Trade Organisation.

For the first time in the history of the WTO, 118 countries at the 11th Ministerial Conference in Buenos Aires last December endorsed a declaration to increase participation of women in trade by removing barriers to, and fostering women’s empowerment.

Nowhere in East Africa is the collective to empower women in trade more pronounced than in Rwanda — one of the top five countries in the world with the highest gender parity indicators along with Iceland, Norway, Finland and Sweden.

While addressing the 11th WTO Ministerial in Buenos Aires last December, the director general Roberto Azevêdo observed that in Rwanda, 74 per cent of people engaged in cross-border trade are women. Ninety per cent of those rely solely on cross-border trade as their income source.

Mr Azevêdo added that countries that export employ more women than those that don’t: For instance, in Cambodia, 86 per cent of employees in the silk industry are women, while in China, 55 per cent of digital entrepreneurs are women.

However, big imbalances of women’s participation international trade still persist as various barriers hamper women entrepreneurs in accessing international markets.

Support

Closer home, official data reveals although Rwanda is known for a strong co-operative alliance that supports women, Uganda government also gives support to women cross-border traders with targeted approaches.

Customs officer Ssozi Kawere said that for a while, Uganda Revenue Authority has used a deliberate method to “listen, engage and train” women traders in order to bring more into the mainstream and to use gazetted border points.

Because of this raining, “a cross-border woman trader is cleared within 20 minutes” at Busia one stop border post.
Ms Kabakyenga said the group joined the trainings after TMEA came in in 2015.
“It’s then that we understood export processes, the codes, the EAC requirements and where to get the documents,” she said.

They also learnt about post-harvest handling, which improved grain quality which fetched higher prices.

Individually, her earnings from selling maize jumped from Ush800,000 ($224) per season in 2015 to Ush70 million ($19,600) currently. At group level, in the space of two years, the earnings have risen from Ush9.2 million ($2,535) in 2015 to Ush603 million ($166,140) in 2017.

According to the last audited accounts at end of 2017, the turnover of her co-operative, which has 8,105 farmers — 89 per cent of whom are women, was Ush2 billion ($551,046).

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