AWIEF are excited to announce our new program in partnership with USAID Southern Africa Trade and Investment Hub (USAID TradeHub).

The USAID-funded ‘Enhanced Small Medium Enterprises (SMEs) Investment and Export Readiness Through a Digital Platform’ program aims to increase the investor, export readiness, and competitiveness of 100 SMEs in nine Southern African countries: Angola, Botswana, Eswatini, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Namibia, South Africa, and Zambia.

The program leverages the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA), a United States Trade Act that significantly enhances market access to the US for qualifying Sub-Saharan African (SSA) countries, and valid until 2025, to drive export trade for the SMEs. Priority industry sectors include Agriculture, Agro-processing, Textiles, Apparels.

The objectives of this new AWIEF program are to: (a) increase exports from the Southern African countries to South Africa; (b) increase exports from all the nine targeted Southern African countries to the United States, leveraging AGOA; and (c) support firms seeking specific trade-related technology transfer (e.g. labelling, branding, laboratories). The program will help strengthen participants’ governance, regulatory compliance, and risk management capabilities.

The 8-week program will be implemented as an online training course through the AWIEF digital platform – the AWIEF Community.

Program Timeline:

Applications for this program are now closed.

Program Starts: Tuesday, May 3, 2022

For more information, please contact: info@awieforum.org

To learn more about AWIEF, please visit: https://www.awieforum.org