If regional trade integration was to work, it has to work for small food traders
Traders and buyers at a market in Zanzibar, Tanzania. Africa’s small cross-border traders move billions in food each year — yet most of this trade remains invisible to official statistics.
More than a decade ago, in what feels like a past life, I worked with the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa).
At the time, I was part of a team helping design what would become the Simplified Trade Regime (STR), a framework intended to ease cross-border trade across corridors linking Malawi, Tanzania, Mozambique, and Zambia that are critical to strengthening agricultural markets across Southern and Eastern Africa.
