Rwanda has achieved strong economic growth in recent years and a sustained record of poverty reduction. Nevertheless, Rwanda has one of the highest trade costs in the world, which contribute to low profitability of traded activities and a strong bias against exports, which impede Rwanda’s continuing development.
Delays at the ports in neighbouring countries, inefficient border crossings and customs management procedures, lack of harmonised standards for trade and production with other countries in the region and low-quality infrastructure all undermine the competitiveness of Rwandan products and firms, and increase the cost of trade.
TradeMark East Africa
TradeMark East Africa (TMEA) is a non-profit organisation which is supporting the Government of Rwanda in achieving its aims of deeper integration in the East African Community (EAC). By working closely with neighbouring countries, the Government is focused on reducing the time and costs of transport, opening new markets, and enhancing the competitiveness of Rwanda’s products and services. This is a core pillar in its strategy to become a middle income country by 2020.
TMEA is funded by the British Government and the governments of Belgium, Denmark and Sweden, among others.
Our role
We were appointed by TMEA Rwanda as its Results and Performance Monitoring Advisor, to lead on the design and delivery of its monitoring and evaluation framework. This position encompassed substantial quality improvements to the TMEA Rwanda country programme logframe and continuing mentoring and capacity building support to each of the 18 Rwandan partner organisations. Our support aimed to improve the quality and coherence of their projects’ design, to develop key performance indicators which are aligned to TMEA’s objectives, to compile baseline information and to develop systems for on-going reporting.
The ultimate goal of this work was to enable TMEA to understand how it is contributing to regional integration and trade competitiveness in Rwanda and by how much.
Contact Ed Hedley (ed.hedley@itad.com) if you would like to discuss this project.
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