Stand at any border post in Southern Africa and watch who goes through it: women with heads and arms laden, people on bicycles and cars that have teetering piles of goods, mini-bus taxis with stacked roofs, dragging trailers.
Many of these vehicles are carrying informal vendors who make their living through cross-border trade. Previously disregarded, they’re increasingly seen as a source of development and poverty alleviation: part of the solution, in other words, to the region’s many economic problems.
Informal cross-border trade is coming under the spotlight this week at a workshop held in the South African capital, Pretoria, by Action Aid — an international charity. The three-day meeting began on Wednesday.
Sally Peberdy, a delegate from the Johannesburg-based Southern African Migration Project who has been monitoring cross-border traders in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) for years, believes more attention needs to be paid to the sector.
”Unfortunately, the activities of people involved in informal cross-border trade appear to have been overlooked,” she noted. This was despite the fact that national and regional policy initiatives, particularly the SADC Free Trade Protocol, portray regional trade as an important way of encouraging growth — and reducing poverty.
”It is estimated that 40% of SADC’s 200-million people live in poverty. These figures are alarming…The regional growth in 2002 was 3,2%, which fell short of the seven percent required to halve the level of poverty by 2015,” said Moono Mupotola of Action Aid’s Southern African Partnership Programme.
The United Nations has set 2015 as the date by which eight key targets known as the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) should be met. The goals include halving the number of people who live on less than a dollar a day, reducing maternal mortality by three quarters and ensuring universal primary education. The MDGs were agreed on by UN member states at a millennium summit held in New York in 2000.
Most of the Southern African region’s poor live in rural areas, and are highly dependent on the agricultural sector for their livelihoods. ”More than 70% of the people in Southern Africa rely on agriculture,” said Rangarirai Machenedze of Seatini, a Harare-based organisation that campaigns for fair global trade.
Increasingly, however, poverty is also taking hold in towns and cities.
A number of studies have shown that in some border regions, small-scale trade contributes up to 50% of overall trade in the area. ”Clearly then there is a need for the policy concerns of this sector to be recognised,” said Helena McLeod, a trade expert based in South Africa.
Chris Landsberg of the Centre for Policy Studies in Johannesburg said SADC’s failure to take small traders into account derived from its focus on developing larger industries in member states that would make the region more immediately attractive to foreign investors.
He also accused SADC of being too bureaucratic, and disregarding the needs of the poor.
”I don’t think the poor have a voice in SADC,” observed Landsberg. ”They hardly engage civil society seeking to alleviate poverty.”
But, John Mwaniki of the Irish Economic Development organisation believes those who feel sidelined by SADC need to take the initiative with reforming the organisation. Quoting former SADC Secretary General Simba Makoni, he said: ”Don’t wait to be invited by SADC. Contact them.”
Landsberg says informal cross-border trade is further undermined by immigration laws that hamper the free movement of people: ”South Africa, Botswana and Namibia recruit skilled workers from the region, yet they are the ones who are reluctant to open up and allow free movements of people.”
The poor also faced difficulties when seeking loans to start cross-border concerns, banks being reluctant to doll out funds to individuals with little– if any — collateral.
According to Peberdy, the lack of attention paid by policy-makers to the activities of cross-border traders reflects, in part, a paucity of information about their activities — and who they are. No-one knows the exact number of informal traders that traverse frontiers in the region
Landsberg believes they account for a large portion of SADC trade. ”I reckon it’s between 30 and 40% … (but) the bottom line is we don’t know.” — IPS