Kenya bets on digitisation to boost intra-Africa trade

Kenya has announced the launch of two interconnected digital trade platforms designed to empower African embassies to boost trade and investment.

The platforms dubbed BiasharaLink and Deal House are expected to provide a common platform for capturing and organising opportunities, transforming informal leads into institutional assets, ensuring that trade and investment prospects are documented, monitored, and pursued.

While Deal House is set to bring credibility, financing, and transaction support, connecting opportunities to execution, ensuring business receives follow through.

With the rapid changes in global trade and shifting supply chains, Kenya is now banking on its tech savvy population and digital platform to boost the country’s trade.

 Speaking during the launch of Biashara Link and Deal House, two interconnected digital trade platforms designed to empower African embassies as transaction-enabling hubs for trade and investment, Prime Cabinet Secretary Musalia Mudavadi noted that in the current global environment, Kenya’s strength lies on cooperation with others and a high conversion rate for opportunities.

“Too often opportunities are identified but not realised, promising engagements stall and potential partnerships fail, transactions take too long, cost too much or fail to yield the expected result. All together this is the execution gap we must confront,” said Mudavadi.

Dr. James Mwangi, Equity Bank Group CEO, said: “What we are witnessing is a partnership between the government and the private sector to create an infrastructure that enables people to walk, to ride, and to drive on trade superhighways. That is why I'm really excited because the scale of bridging the gap can be significant because it's not a physical infrastructure.”

The platforms which have been developed by Real Sources Africa, a Pan-African trade infrastructure institution, in partnership with Equity Bank, have been designed to close the continent’s trade execution gaps.

With stakeholders welcoming the move, noting that it will cut the red tape and open the market for Kenyan and African firms to trade across the continent more efficiently and affordably.

“It has been very difficult in the past for banks to finance trade because the deals are normally not connected. These platforms connect the buyers and the sellers virtually. You can imagine the amount of cost that we are removing from buyers and sellers on a platform. This means we are circumventing the problems we have always had of boundaries of countries,” Dr. Mwangi added.

Wamkele Mene, AfCFTA Secretary General, added: “As the world is moving ever closer to the precipice of fragmentation, supply chain disruption, increased trade protectionism, increased investment protectionism, increased industrial development protectionism, our continent is moving in the opposite direction. We’re liberalising trade, we are liberalising investment.”

The private sector has also called for the inclusion of other trade entities on the platforms in order to mobilise and take advantage of economies of scale.