Did you know that many of the products at the ONE Store are sourced from organic products from African countries like Uganda, Tanzania and Swaziland?
To help raise awareness for African trade — a crucial tool in Africa’s efforts to develop their economies and escape poverty — we created a special tag to accompany all our African-made products.
It has information about the multi-tiered and multilateral benefits of doing business with Africa.
The production of ONE products in Africa helps provide jobs and independence and puts money into the pockets of hard-working men and women — money that pays for basic necessities such as food, shelter and medicine for children.
Barrett Ward is the founder of fashionABLE, a Nashville-based fashion company that does trade with Africa in order to bolster economic opportunities for the most vulnerable. In this blog post, he writes about one of his workers, Bezuayhu.
Bezuayhu parents died when she was a girl, so she stayed with her grandparents. They wanted her to work as opposed to attending school, so she left for the capital city. Unable to find her way in the city as a teenager, the predators of the sex industry brought Bezuayhu the false promise of hope in the form of prostitution. Her life was having to give herself to dirty men for less than a dollar at best, and facing the threat of being beaten and raped as an occupational hazard.
We’ve heard from a number of commentators as part of our Trade and Development blog series on the importance of helping Africa trade more with the US and with itself. Richard Gilbert of Business Action for Africa and Zenia Lewis of the Brookings Institute both talked about the need to bring down the barriers between countries and make trade quicker and easier. New research from the World Bank says trade between southern African countries accounts for just 10 percent of all their trade compared to 40 percent in North America.
Initiatives like AGOA and technical assistance from the Millennium Challenge Corporation can help build roads and improve communications — but the political will to open borders has to come from African governments themselves. They have been promising to do this for some time (they first committed to a Common Market for Africa at the Africa Union in 1970s) and have signed a myriad of overlapping free trade agreements among themselves (around 27 across the continent at the last count) but few tariffs have been eliminated and it still takes longer to transport goods between countries than practically anywhere else in the world.
Ed Gresser of the Trade, Aid and Security Coalition looks back on African trade to the US since the African Growth and Opportunity Act was implemented ten years ago.
Perhaps you’ve seen it in a pet shop. “Nyjer,” a little black seed fed to birds like the finch and bluebird, is the priciest birdseed at the market at $1.50 a pound. Ethiopians have a near-monopoly on this product. Farmers on Ethiopia’s high plateau have grown and harvested it, under the name of “noug” or “niger seed,” for cooking oil over the last five millennia.
To their surprise, they now sell it worldwide, providing about two-thirds of America’s imported birdseed. The manager of an Addis Ababa trading firm describes how stunned he was to find Americans buying expensive seeds simply to throw them away to birds:
If you think US trade policy has nothing to do with you, think again. Ten years ago, it was much harder to get items, especially from Africa, imported into the United States and on supermarket shelves.
I know some of you have to have been in my shoes. You try something on vacation in a foreign country — or someone brings you a peace offering in their carry-on -– and six months later you crave it. But where are you going to get that German rosehip jam, that Scottish fizzy drink, that amazing Moroccan saffron, or chocolate bars made with Ivorian cocoa? Thanks to the Africa Growth and Opportunities Act (AGOA), African exports can now get into the US market more easily.
Zenia Lewis and Brandon Routman from the Brookings Institution’s Africa Growth Initiative reflect on the African Growth and Opportunities Act Forum.
The Africa Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) Forum was held in Lusaka, Zambia a few weeks ago, and several of us from the Brookings Institution’s Africa Growth Initiative (AGI) were lucky enough to attend.
Needless to say, it was a busy week. We presented findings of our research, sat in on high-level meetings, spoke with media outlets and met scores of people.
The forum provided us an excellent opportunity to listen to others’ ideas and express our own thoughts on how to make AGOA work better for African economies.
ONE’s Africa Director Dr. Sipho Moyo reflects on some of the lessons learned at this year’s African Growth and Development Act Forum in Lusaka, Zambia. The outcomes of this event will help guide trade between the US and Africa.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at the AGOA Forum in Lusaka, Zambia. Photo courtesy of the State Department
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