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Africa: UN Trade Agency Aims to Bring the Poor into the Process

Tamela Hultman

29 September 2006

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interview

Berlin — The Geneva-based International Trade Center (ITC) and the German Ministry of Economic Cooperation are hosting a forum in Berlin, focusing on how exports can reduce poverty in the developing world. Among the topics being discussed by a range of international participants, including teams from some 30 developing countries, are land reform, the role of women entrepreneurs, access to technology, NGO-business-government partnerships, fair trade and corporate social responsibility.

ITC Executive Director Patricia R. Francis, only 90 days into the job, is a former president of Jamaica Promotions Corporation and of the World Association of Investment Promotion Agencies, as well as a former member of Jamaica’s Cabinet Committee for Development. She took a few moments during the forum to discuss her plans with AllAfrica’s Tami Hultman over the telephone.

Is the forum going well?

It is actually going very, very well. We are very pleased with the level of energy. The panels have been good and audience participation has been excellent, so we are hoping that it is going to have a wonderful outcome.

Could you take a minute to explain exactly what the ITC is?

We are a technical assistance organization, whose work is to take the policy initiatives of the World Trade Organization and UNCTAD - which is the United Nations development cooperation organization - and translate those for the private sector and to have the private sector understand what these opportunities are and take advantage of them. So, we help small and medium-sized enterprises, and we are just beginning to work with communities to [help them] tap into global trade. We spend approximately 40 percent of our resources in Africa and, in particular, on least-developed countries.

We function in three different areas. We work with the government and bring the private sector view to government in terms of policy development. Then, at the intermediary level, we work with what we call trade support organizations, such as the one I used to run, and with chambers of commerce or sector organizations. And then we work at the enterprise level. That is what we do.

Kofi Annan has complimented the ITC for balancing “the commercially inspired demands of its clients in the business sector with the wider imperatives of sustainable development and poverty reduction.” How does that happen, and how does that relate to this forum theme of “Bringing the Poor into the Export Process”?

In the last three years, the ITC has been trying to develop a methodology by which we go directly to the poor and work with the poor, particularly in the communities to link them directly into global trade. So we’ve been doing this right across the world, and we are looking at results of that at this conference.

While you were director of Jamaica’s export organization, it was judged, by your peers internationally, as the best export promotion agency in a small economy. You’ve also led global investment initiatives. How has that prepared you for this job?

Well, I didn’t have a huge learning curve, which was important. I wasn’t dealing with an issue that I didn’t know anything about, and I understand the issues from the customers’ perspective, because many of our customers so to speak, if you want to think about the people that we interact with at the ITC as customers, would have been people like myself and organizations such as the one that I used to run. So I know - more than intuitively - what it is that organizations, such as the one I used to run, actually need to help them really deliver and transform things in their own country.

That previous experience allowed me to quickly understand what the organization was about, and then to understand the many services that it did deliver. So that is what I have been spending my time on, really getting to know the different programs in a more intimate way than before and to make some judgments as to where I think the organization ought to go in the future.

ITC has such a range of programs – seminars, mentoring, training, policy dialogues, information and technology services. Distill that into some concrete examples of how your work in Africa promotes development.

Let’s use, for example, the leather sector in Africa. We are, in four or five different countries, working on development of the leather sector. We look, first of all, at the factors that are inhibiting the companies from actually earning more from what they are doing. Those usually have to do with the way that the leather is processed and if they are doing any kind of value-added production or not. And if they have been doing value-added production, are there issues related to the competitiveness of the companies, the design capabilities of the company? And can we do something to improve that?

So, in Ethiopia, for example, we brought in some European designers to work with a number of people who are small artisans, who don’t actually have a sense of what to do to get into the international market place - who had been making products for the domestic market and were perhaps having a difficult time even competing with the local market. Those international designers brought to the table the methodology of the developed world. What are trends? What are color dimensions? How do you take local design influences and use those to create contemporary products which would be able to be sold anywhere in the world? And we came up with a line of leather products.

We have married the artisans with two large tanneries that export significant amounts out of Ethiopia every year - companies with a track record of understanding the international market place and with large distributors. So those products are now being sold in Europe.

We’ve done the same thing in the craft industry, producing products which are now sold in stores in Canada for the house-wares market - you know, table mats and things that once would have been called crafts but which are now being able to be sold in high profile stores in the United States and in Canada. We are doing the same thing with entities involved in the textile industry, producing either garments for the international market place or beautifully woven fabrics which are African in design but maybe more contemporary in choice of colors. So the colors will fit the color schemes for each year.

We bring that international flavor and the understanding of how one would package, how one would present. If we are working in the food industry, we bring in the quality standards and all those things that are necessary to give market access.

At the intermediary level, we work on what we call national export strategies and there we have the intermediary organizations to analyze what is happening in their country, where the opportunities exist, identify strengths and weaknesses and work with a number of different entities to ensure that what we come up with is an inclusive plan. A national export strategy would involve the companies themselves, NGOs, the government and, of course, the various regulatory agencies that are involved in coming up with a complete supply chain, from market all the way to production.

And at the government policy level, we would be involved in looking at the market access issues and also helping companies and countries prepare their proposals to the World Trade Organization. And we do an analysis of the private sector, to have [government] understand the issues and ensure that the private sector becomes part of the dialogue. So promoting private sector initiatives is another big part of what we do.

It’s a very large agenda …

Well, we are certainly an organization which responds to the requests which come to us. And while the agenda is large, we work in partnerships. We don’t try to do everything ourselves, and we certainly believe that what we need to be doing is building capacities in countries themselves.

So, while we are a small organization, we have a rooster of over 2000 consultants who work with us, many of them locally based in the countries in which we work. One of the things that we aim to do is to build that capacity in those countries, because at the end of the day, we only want to give direction - to give countries themselves the capability of taking the tools that we have provided them and being able to utilize them afterwards to their own benefit after we have left. This is how a small organization can have such impact. What we have created are tools and training solutions, which we believe can be applied to help entities build their own capacities to be able to deliver the services and empower the intermediary organizations to actually take on the work of trade promotion and trade development.

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