By Lebone Rodah Mosima
Small businesses should use embassies and export-support agencies to break into Africa’s 1.3-billion-person free-trade market, business leaders said this week, adding that payment, information and market-access barriers still constrain intra-African trade.
Speaking as the third annual Embassies Business Fair and Conference drew to a close, Vuhosi Consulting Group CEO Telavukosi Mabasa said the event was aimed at positioning South African SMMEs to take advantage of opportunities under the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA).
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“Our whole theme this year was to do intra-trade in Africa, standing on the African Free Trade Agreement that is in place, to say we might be 1.3 billion Africans, and how do we turn that into the trillion [in monetary] potential through African trade,” Mabasa said.
“We want all the small businesses that are here, or all the companies that are here, to enable them, so they know that embassies can be their first step.”
Mabasa said companies looking to expand into other African markets had to understand differences in culture, tariffs, currencies and the movement of money across borders.
She said one of the major challenges was that payments and trade within Africa were still not as seamless as they should be.
Mabasa linked the discussion to Startup20, an official G20 engagement group during South Africa’s 2025 presidency, where cross-border financing, market access and regional economic integration formed part of discussions around strengthening entrepreneurship.
“We saw that, coming through the Startup 20 as part of the G20 initiative with the presidency of South Africa is one of the things we were saying, how do we come up with ways to take away the barriers of money movement or barriers of trade within ourselves as Africa.”
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She said expanding African trade would require more than access to finance, with many SMMEs also struggling to find reliable information about markets, regulations and export requirements.
Mabasa said the conference was intended to connect small businesses directly with embassies and other organisations that could help them understand those requirements and assess whether they were ready to export.
She said the platform offered small businesses an opportunity to better understand AfCFTA and how they could participate in increased trade across the continent.
“I believe that these type of platforms give a headline, give a spotlight to know where to go and how to go, and I think that was the crux why we’re here and what SMMEs can get out of it,” she said.
She said exhibitions at the conference also allowed companies to engage with embassies, obtain information about logistics and assess their export readiness.
Mabasa pointed to Deputy Minister of Small Business Development Jane Sithole’s discussions on whether small businesses were adequately prepared to meet compliance requirements and how government could assist them.
She also highlighted the role of the Gauteng Growth and Development Agency in helping businesses prepare for export markets.
Mabasa said she hoped future editions of the conference would be able to showcase companies that had attended this year and subsequently secured export opportunities.
“How do we come together as trade? If we trade together as Africa, we are going to move forward.”
Pierre Calitz, founding president of the Eastern European Southern Africa Chamber of Commerce and Industry, told the conference that businesses also needed to understand markets before attempting to sell into them.
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Calitz said his chamber was developing trade links between Southern Africa and 21 Central and Eastern European markets, with significant scope to expand trade beyond the region’s biggest existing partners.
He said many entrepreneurs started businesses because they were passionate about a product or idea, but passion alone was not enough to establish whether there was a viable market.
“But love is where it starts. Love is not where we sell. Stephen Covey gave us a habit I think is the most useful sentence in business: “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” We do the opposite,” he said.
“We build a product, we perfect it, and we take it to the market, and we want people to understand it.”
Calitz said businesses needed to establish whether they were filling a genuine market gap rather than attempting to persuade consumers to buy something simply because the entrepreneur believed in it.
He said gaps could be measured through trade and market data and businesses should research those figures before expanding.
Calitz cited South African citrus exports as an example, saying the product already reached 20 of the 21 European markets covered by the chamber but that penetration differed substantially between countries.
He pointed to Poland and North Macedonia as examples of markets with sharply different levels of South African citrus imports, adding that population size alone could not explain the disparity and that market presence and positioning also mattered.
According to trade figures presented by Calitz, two-way trade between South Africa and the 21 European markets covered by the chamber reached about $5.1 billion last year, comprising roughly $2.7 billion in imports into South Africa and $2.4 billion in South African exports.
He said Poland and the Czech Republic accounted for more than half of that trade, leaving significant room for growth across the other markets.
Using Moldova as an example of a smaller Eastern European market and its trade relationship with the 16-member Southern African Development Community, Calitz said:
“Which means the other 19 countries share the rest of the trade, and then there is the Republic of Moldova, with 16 SADC regional countries, one European market,” he said.
Calitz said figures presented by the chamber showed that 11 of the 16 SADC countries recorded no purchases from Moldova in the dataset he was using.
“That is not a market that is closed; that is a market that no one has walked in,” he said.
He said the figures illustrated why companies should identify measurable gaps rather than relying on assumptions about where demand existed.
