‘Make business easy to boost cross-border trade’

Pretoria - Making the way of doing business easier in South Africa will go a way long in attracting more foreign investors to the country.

This sentiment was shared by a panel of four businesswomen at the Tshwane International Trade and Infrastructure Investment conference at the CSIR yesterday.

Panellists exchanged ideas on the subject of “facilitating a conducive environment for trade and investment across borders”.

Lerato Mataboge, chief director at the Department of Trade and Industry, said municipalities were well positioned at micro level to engineer ways of doing business.

Local companies needed to be “export ready” for specific businesses, she said.

Infrastructure development in southern Africa was at the heart of the department, she said.

Through an initiative called Trade Africa Programme, the department aimed to strengthen two-way trade among countries in Africa. “We as Africans don’t believe in our own countries,” she said.

Portia Gumbu-Dube, head of Business Development at Export Credit Insurance Corporation SA, said there was generally not much export of capital goods between African countries.

The rhetoric that intra-Africa trade was significant needed to be supported by universities, she said.

Institutions of higher learning needed to offer a compulsory curriculum that focused on the intra-Africa trade, she said. “We need to educate each other on how to do good cross-border trade,” she said.

At her organisation there was a programme offering graduates first-hand experience of doing business.

The notion of “taking a girl child to work” should become part of people’s every day life, she said.

Small businesses were the backbone of any economy and ought to be given stakes in tenders, she said. “If the city puts out a tender we have to know from potential tender bidders how they intend to involve small businesses.”

Cities can play a proactive role in lobbying the government to make it easier for people from outside to do business locally, she said.

Catherine Grant-Makokera, director at Tutwa Consulting Group, proposed that beyond the conference there should be “personnel who would make things move swiftly”.

African countries were far away from the global economy. “If we need to be players in that space we need to start making things happen.”

The government should play a critical role to help companies with cross-border businesses, she said.

Safiyya Akoojee, director at Thomson Wilk Attorneys, said she had come cross many people outside the country who didn’t know how they could do business in South Africa. She identified one stumbling block as being the challenge to expand the reach of local businesses to the Francophone countries.

Brand SA general manager, Dr Petrus de Kock, who mediated the discussion, said the country was the top foreign direct investment destination on the continent.

The conference ends today with a business breakfast hosted by mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa.

rapula.moatshe@inl.co.za

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