SUNS  4317 Thursday 5 November 1998


AFRICA: BREAKING TRADE BARRIER

Nairobi, Nov 4 (IPS/Judith Achieng') -- Ethiopian Hadia Mohamed had little experience when she ventured into transport business moving cargo between Kenya and Ethiopia.

Her problem began when her two trucks were grounded at the Moyale border post, about 800 kilometres north of the Kenyan capital of Nairobi, because she didn't have all the necessary documents to enable the vehicles to cross into Ethiopia. After one-gruelling month of waiting, she was denied the permit by Ethiopian authorities.

Mohamed says although she has now established herself in the business, it has never been easy. "It took me some months before I could convince Ethiopian authorities to part with the permit," she recalls.

Mohamed also has found out that "transport business in this region is dominated by men. Wherever I went to work, whether for the purpose of registering my company or marketing my capability to undertake transport operations, I was not taken seriously."
Trade barrier within Africa could be a nightmare. The obstacles range from high tariffs and currency disharmony to dealing with corrupt officials.

To resolve the problem, African businesswomen, who form about 60 percent of small scale traders on the continent, have urged their governments to remove the obstacles as a matter of urgency.

"The critical situations which our respective countries should engage themselves in is the problem of trade barriers in general," said Saba Mehratu of Eritrea.

Mehratu was speaking at last week's seminar in Nairobi organised by IGAD to seek ways of improving existing regional policies related to trade tariffs, immigration and customs laws to improve trade in the region.

IGAD, the Inter-governmental Authority on Development, groups Kenya, Uganda, Uganda, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Somalia, Sudan and Djibouti.

"Whatever the motives behind tariff imposition or increase, their effect is necessarily one of creating trade distortions making imported and exported goods more expensive, thus discouraging domestic consumers as well as encouraging consumption and production of domestically produced imported replacement substitutes," said Mehratu.

The imposition of high tariffs, compounded by lack of harmony of currencies, has prevented most African countries from trading between themselves, the participants said.

Last month African women, who attended the international exhibition conference in the Ethiopian capital of Addis Ababa, told woeful tales.
"Some of us had to produce letters of permission from our husbands and brothers before we could be granted visas," a Zambian woman told IPS.

Some women, especially from Cameroon and Ghana, were forced to leave behind some of their textile fabric in Nairobi, where they connected their flights, as they could not afford the 1,000 US Dollars charged for every extra 50 kilogrammes by the airline.

Others complained about the exorbitant rates of rented space at the exhibition centre in Addis Ababa. "How can we talk of Africa joining the global trade if Africans cannot even trade with themselves," Lucia Quachey of the Ghana-based African Federation of Women Entrepreneurs
(AFWE) complained.

She told the Addis Ababa conference that unless Africa embarks on an aggressive campaign towards open market competitiveness and strong regional integration, it would still lag behind in development.

"Africa's real industrialisation would begin if Africa's women entrepreneurs who constitute the majority of the micro and small scale informal sector are properly supported to assume their proper roles in the overall socio-economic and political decision making process of governance in their respective countries," said Quachey.

Statistics on intra-Africa trade is hard to come by. But sub- Saharan  Africa, with a population of more than 600 million people, accounts for less than 3 percent of total world trade, according to the World Bank.