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Business Reporter
THE Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (Comesa) plans to set up market infrastructure near borders to ease connection challenges between traders and customers.
In a statement, Comesa said it has been discovered that poor quality or absence of storage facilities was resulting in traders selling perishable stock at losses to prevent spoilage.
Against this background, a cross border market infrastructure benchmark was recently conducted with a view to come up with recommendations for the setting up of necessary infrastructure to ease a host of challenges traders within the Comesa region were facing.
“It has been discovered that lack of market infrastructure near borders reduces the connection between traders and customers,” said the trading bloc.
“Female cross border traders who deal primarily with low value perishable primary products are particularly susceptible to this occurrence.
“This is clearly not a conducive environment to have a competitive business.”
To help alleviate the challenge, the Comesa secretariat and other stakeholders such as the Cross-Border Trade Associations (CBTA) last month undertook a detailed needs assessments at selected border areas, which include Mwami/Mchinji, Kasumbalesa, Chirundu and Tunduma/Nakonde.
“The detailed needs assessment was undertaken to identify infrastructure that will support small-scale cross border traders to trade with ease, reduce trading times and costs and improve the general livelihoods of border communities and other people who depend on cross border trade to earn a living,” said Comesa.
The main objective of the mission was to collect benchmarking data that will form an evidence base for the technical recommendations to stakeholders who have submitted preliminary designs and bills of quantities for reviewing and advice.
It is hoped that the benchmarking data will assist in supporting further steps arising from the findings and recommendations of the detailed needs assessments.
“The needs assessments have come up with border-specific recommendations of the infrastructure that will be developed and delivered at Chirundu, on both the Zambian and Zimbabwean sides; Mwami, at Chipata; Kasumbalesa, on both the Zambian and the Democratic Republic of Congo sides, and Nakonde on the Zambian side,” said the trading bloc.
A total of six sites have been identified for construction of border markets and high-level concept or preliminary designs will be required to form the basis of feasibility studies at the identified site.
The outcomes of the feasibility study will inform the detailed designs and form the basis of preliminary costs for each site.
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