SADC is piloting and rolling out the SADC Regional Customs Transit Guarantee Regulations (RCTG) along the North South Corridor (NSC) and other corridors to ensure there are no hassles to trade in the Region.
It is doing this through building capacity and raising awareness among customs officials and stakeholders.
The NSC connects the South African port of Durban to Lusaka, Zambia, Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, and to Lilongwe and Blantyre in Malawi, through Johannesburg (South Africa), Botswana, and Zimbabwe and is a vital corridor for trade and the sustenance of SADC regional integration.
The SADC RCTG regulations are intended to facilitate the movement of goods, reduce transaction costs, increase the level of competitiveness of regional producers, and support the removal of non-tariff barriers.
Training materials for the RCTG have been reviewed and assessed consistent with Member States' needs, while training workshops have been held in Botswana, South Africa and Zimbabwe attended by public/private sector stakeholders.
The customs transit facility will facilitate goods in transit by using a single recognised guarantee.
In addition, SADC is developing Coordinated Border Management Strategies for selected Member States along the NSC to improve efficacy and effectiveness at the border posts.. As part of this assignment, currently a national CBM Strategy for Mozambique has been developed and is under review.
The Region is also harmonising and standardising trade and customs documents, processes and procedures for border operations, including One Stop Border Posts (OSBP).
The inception phase of this project has been completed and data collection and analysis tools development is underway to assess the level of harmonisation and standardisation of documents, processes and procedures on selected border posts and seaports.
All these developments to smoothen trade in the SADC Region are being carried out under the European Union (EU) supported SADC Trade Facilitation Programme (TFP) which covers 28 trade facilitation measures (TFMs) clustered around four pillars, namely transparency, predictability, simplification, and cooperation, roughly corresponding to the measures contained in the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement.
