Trade Forum, NIFA sign MSME deal
The Namibia Trade Forum (NTF) and the Namibia Investment and Finance Academy (NIFA) formalised a cooperation agreement on Tuesday to advance domestication of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) and boost trade competitiveness among medium, small and micro enterprises (MSMEs).
The NTF is Namibia's public-private trade policy dialogue platform, while NIFA is a specialised MSME capacity development and investment-readiness institution. The two organisations said they intend to close the gap between trade policy formulation and enterprise-level execution.
Rodney !Hoaeb, the acting chief executive officer of the NTF, said the memorandum of understanding between the two bodies was the framework. "The enabling instrument through which specific, aligned initiatives will be pursued over the coming years".
He said Namibia participated in multilateral trade architectures that, on paper, offered significant opportunity for enterprises to compete regionally and continentally, but that architecture alone did not create competitiveness. The gap between what Namibia had signed at continental level and what its enterprises were equipped to act upon was, in the Trade Forum's assessment, principally regulatory, interpretive and institutional, he said.
"It is not, at its core, a commercial gap. It is a translation gap," !Hoaeb said.
He said this was precisely where a partnership between the NTF and NIFA became structurally significant, adding that the two institutions would engage jointly on MSME trade readiness and on designing capability instruments that aligned enterprise competitiveness with regional and continental trade requirements.
In a speech delivered on behalf of NIFA chief executive Arinze Okafor by head of business development and strategy Morris Kalunduka, the agreement was described as the deliberate closing of a structural gap in Namibia's MSME ecosystem.
Namibia's MSMEs sat at the receiving end of a trade policy architecture that, in its ambition, was genuinely world-class, Okafor said in the speech. But at enterprise level, the frameworks were frequently unreachable, not because entrepreneurs lacked ambition or their products lacked merit, but because there had historically been no consistent institutional conduit for translation, preparation and readiness between the policy framework and the enterprise, he said.
