Annual Reviews of TradeMark East Africa 2021/2022

TradeMark East Africa (TMEA) is an aid-for-trade organisation established in 2010. Originally concentrated on the five countries of the East African Community (EAC) i.e., Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania and Uganda, it has since expanded to, and started interventions in, DRC, South Sudan, Zambia and the Horn of Africa. The ultimate goal of TMEA is greater prosperity and the reduction of poverty in East Africa. The premise is that one way this can be achieved is by increasing East Africa's trade within the region and with the rest of the world, leading to increased demand for goods and services and creation of jobs and rising incomes levels. TMEA strives to help the individual countries and the region as a whole to address impediments in increasing trade in East Africa.

FCG Sweden led consortium has been contracted to conduct annual reviews of TMEA during the Strategy 2 period from 2018-2023, working closely with the TMEA Results Team and the UK Foreign Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO, previously DFID). In the annual review undertaken in 2021 covered the period from July 1st, 2021, to June 30th, 2022. Prior to that, the FCG Sweden led consortium conducted the 2018, 2019, 2020 and 2021 Annual Reviews.

A separate annual review was carried out for each country programme, producing seven dedicated reports (Ethiopia and Somaliland united under one programme), as well as for the TMEA regional programme. Following the completed reviews of the country and regional programmes, the final deliverable of the review is a summary report, which syntheses findings, conclusions, lessons learned and recommendations across the whole TMEA programme. The summary report is written and presented to the TMEA Evaluation Committee, which include the other TMEA donors (Danish MFA, Dutch MFA, Finnish MFA, Norwegian MFA, USAID, Irish Aid, DEVCO, Belgian Development Cooperation, Foreign Affairs, Trade and Development Canada, AFD). The report is written in such a way as to be accessible to a wide range of readers with no prior knowledge of the TMEA programme. In 2022, a graphic designer assisted the team in producing a summary report in a new format, with findings presented in a way that is visually engaging and easy to navigate.

The review process includes assessment of progress made in 2021-2022 towards outputs and outcomes in the TMEA results frameworks. Adjustments in design, programming and the results framework are made based on the lessons learned and recommendations of the annual review, which are then followed up by the following year's annual review, allowing for continuous learning. In particular, the review assesses quality, timeliness and relevance of outputs and outcomes achieved, coordination and additionality of interventions, effectiveness of TMEA relationship with its partners. The review team also makes special considerations in the review process for cross-cutting issues of technical and financial sustainability, gender and inclusion, and climate change. In 2022, an additional analysis was done on the effects of the FCDO budget cuts on the programming and pandemic related restrictions, as well as the results of the SafeTrade Emergency Facility, which was TMEA’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic. As Strategy 2 nears its end, more emphasis was put on the progress towards intermediate outcomes in this year’s review.

So far, the annual reviews have showed that TMEA has successfully contributed to very significant results benefitting countries of both East Africa and those who trade with them, including reducing transit times at ports and borders and reducing testing times and costs for the most traded locally-produced goods in the EAC. This is apart from the goodwill and trust TMEA has been able to foster, and collaborative partnerships it has been able to forge with the East African Community Secretariat, national governments, the private sector and civil society. One of the key recommendations provided was the need to think critically about TMEA’s own internal capacity and systems, and about building the capacity of institutional partners, as TMEA moves forward into Strategy 3.