The Southern African Development Community (SADC) Committee of Ministers of Transport have endorsed Beitbridge, Kazungula, Kasumbalesa and Chirundu One-Stop Border Posts for the piloting of the NEPAD Agency MoveAfrica’s Traffic Light System (TLS), as well as the roadmap for implementation of the TLS on the selected pilot border posts.

The SADC Committee of Ministers meeting which took place in Lilongwe, Malawi from 30 October to 3 November, endorsed the selection of four one-stop border posts to pilot the Traffic Light System. The piloting will look at performance ranking and take necessary corrective action where applicable. It will also contribute to the documentation of lessons learnt to enable the development of good practices which can be replicated to other border posts in the movement of goods, people and services.

This phase of the MoveAfrica’s Traffic Light System completes the Institutionalisation Process which began in January 2017, with the first milestone being met in July 2017, when the SADC Ministers of Transport for the Beira Development Corridor and North South Corridor countries, endorsed it as the tool to monitor and evaluate the performance of trade corridors. This is in a bid to unlock the transport and logistics bottlenecks identified in various reports that look at logistics and trade in Africa.

Following the endorsement of the TLS in Beira, Mozambique, a technical meeting was held with the Development Bank of Southern Africa, the SADC Secretariat and private sector to develop the roadmap for piloting the tool. The technical team selected four border posts (Beitbridge – between South Africa and Zimbabwe; Kazungula between Botswana and Zambia; Kasumbalesa, Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia; and Chirundu between Zambia and Zimbabwe) for piloting.

The four border posts were selected based on volumes and their high levels of activity, as well as their strategic locations in the region.

The roadmap for the implementation of the TLS on the pilot border posts will be done in a 3-phase approach as follows:

• Phase 1, will look at the reporting of different indexes and sources.

• Phase 2, will look deeper into the market dynamics, investment potential vis-à-vis risk assessments to ascertain the type and level of effort needed in a particular corridor by classifying the One-Stop Border Posts into A, B or C categories. 

• Phase 3 will give the overall ranking based on the variables in the first two sections to arrive at the traffic light categories of Green, Orange and Red.