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.
In the examples you cited of assisting local enterprises, however useful that work, you can only reach a fraction of people who might benefit from those services. The question becomes, how do you scale up the programmes? Are you trying, in a sense, to create exemplary projects that prove poor people can export their products and benefit from doing so?
That is precisely what we try to do. We try to illustrate what is possible and to demonstrate that it is possible, which is also part of what we have to overcome. You start out with people saying, ‘I am an LDC [least- developed country]”… “We are not capable of… “We are the victims of …” Those are the kind of things that you hear. And, in many of the countries that we are working in, there isn’t a real private sector. You have had governments that control the main pillars of the economy, and therefore there is still not this real entrepreneur capacity.
So, this demonstration effect is very, very important, and I think, to a large extent, this is what we are examining at this conference. We are looking at what has worked, what has not worked, how we scale it up. Very, very important, because while we have been able to do little things, and one project may have an impact on 4000 women, and multiply that by however many families - to the size of the problem, even in a country, much less a region, it’s miniscule.
If these programs are going to be scaled up, there is going to have to be some recognition, either at the local government level or at the national government level, that these projects have had an impact, that the approaches that we have taken are things that can be replicated by the governments themselves. Therefore, as we move forward, we will be trying to seek greater visibility for what we are doing. We believe that everybody loves the winner, so governments will, we believe, actually embrace what we are doing and take on some of these projects themselves, going forward, and replicate them. That is what we are hoping will happen.
Tourism has become widely regarded as an engine of creating jobs and combating poverty. You also have projects in that area, especially in “community-based tourism.”
We have a number of different projects in community-based tourism. It has been helping in two ways; one, in connecting the community into the large hotels investment that is going on in a number of places, so there is not this disconnect and disenfranchisement of the communities that exist around these big investments. That’s very important. How can small businesses become parties to supply chain, to the inputs that these large hotels consume? That’s one approach that we have been taking. Some of the services may include small tours, may include selling them actual goods, whether it be crafts and art and entertainment.
The second thing is to look at how people can use the assets that they currently have, teaching them how to set up a marketing system and also understanding the standards. Maybe some of the very small enterprises are either bed-and-breakfast type entities, or really small hotels.
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We are working very closely with the United Nations World Tourism Organization to develop a methodology together in this regard. We don’t want to be doing something that the World Tourism Organization does not support. So, the tourism organization is here at our event, and they are very much involved in everything that we have been doing. So, in gauging the assets of the community, being part of the tourism industry is very much what we are looking at. I think we have had some pretty good successes in that regard.
You’re new on the job, as are your deputy and other senior directors. What does that auger for the future of the ITC?
It is a fantastic team. The great thing is that three of us have pragmatic and practical experience in the field and three of us are from the developing world - one from Asia, one from Africa and one from the Caribbean. So we do actually represent the largest segment of the world population. My deputy is from the U.K. and our head of administration is from Canada. I think the diversity we have is very important from the perspective of the people with whom we interact.
I believe that the organization will to a large extent ramp up on the issues related to Africa. The imperative of the LDCs is something which we all bring to the table, and we understand that the biggest challenge is going to be Africa. We are not going to do this to the neglect of the other parts of the developing world, but I think the majority of our resources will be focused in that area.
To that extent, we signed a memorandum of understanding with the Economic Commission for Africa, and we are working towards also signing one with the ACP grouping. So we are identifying critical partners that we can align ourselves with that can assist in the focus of the organization, which is the development of trade capacity.
The supply side of trade capacity is to be able to take advantage of all these numerous trade agreements that everybody is signing. I think that that is the critical issue.
Market access is one thing, but how do I bring my people into the trade arena? That is what the organization is going to be focusing on, and I think with the partnerships we are going to be creating with various other institutions, we are going to be expanding the delivery of technical assistance by creating these partnerships.
We will be hoping to have much greater impact in the future. I don’t think we will be doing all of the things that we did in the past. We are going to focus the organization, and we are going through a process now of gathering information from our clients to determine where the real needs are. We have some indication of where those needs will be, but I think that by the first week of December, we will have a plan of action which will have been validated by our development partners, as well as with countries that we will be looking to continue to work with.
You don’t lack for challenges! Does that energize you?
That’s why I’m here … (laughs). But I believe in focus, focus, focus.
