East African women benefit from cross-border trade support: expert

NAIROBI, May 9 Xinhua) -- At least 350,000 women in East Africa are set to be supported to become import and export traders to take advantage of the region's common market, top official of the implementing agency Trade Mark East Africa said in Nairobi on Wednesday.

Frank Matsaert, the CEO of Trade Mark East Africa, said the support has been motivated by the fact that 5,000 women targeted in the phase one of the project and another 25,000 in phase two since 2010 had doubled their income.

"This is a commitment we are making today to ensure that women of East Africa fully benefit from the common market," he said during the launch of a report in Nairobi on accessing how women have fared in trade within the regional bloc.

"Women play a crucial role in growing trade and therefore economies within East Africa. We therefore need to find ways of supporting women in business. It is about partnerships with various organizations," Matsaert added.

Trade Mark East Africa is a non-profit body that works with various partners to grow potential or intra-East Africa and the region's potential to export.

Its various activities indicate that it has been active and instrumental in reforming border point entries to ease business environment especially for the small-scale traders selling across borders.

The organization said its flagship project has been One Stop Border Post Program, which facilitates joint processing to reduce transit costs incurred in cross border movement by combining the activities of both country's border organizations and agencies at either a single common location or at a single location in each direction without increasing risk to public safety or revenue collection.

"Our focus initially was on reducing the cost of doing business especially at the borders where small traders were being harassed. But now we also focus on helping women participate effectively in the intra-regional trade. Our target is to work with one million women in the next eight years," said Matsaert.

He called on the regional governments and development partners to focus on addressing systematic challenges that continue to slow women's participation in business, citing lack of access to adequate financing, lack of access to assets, and cultural effects on women's property rights.

He also said the region must invest more resources in gathering statistics about informal trade so that those concerned are able to make better policy decisions. Enditem