34th trade ministerial across SADC — capital and bankability across SADC member states

June 12, 2025

Every trade facilitation announcement eventually meets the same question: who pays for it. SADC's 34th Committee of Ministers of Trade, meeting in Harare on 5 June 2025, adopted a new SADC Investment Climate Scorecard developed jointly with the European Union, the World Bank and the OECD, and directed further institutional work on a regional dispute settlement mechanism. Neither of those decisions moves money on its own. Both are attempts to make SADC markets easier for capital to underwrite — which is a different, harder problem than agreeing a tariff schedule.

The bloc's own trade facilitation infrastructure is a useful reminder of how that financing question has been answered before. The EU-funded SADC Trade Facilitation Programme, a five-year, roughly €15 million initiative that built customs technical assistance and border-post support across the region, formally closed out its work in 2024. Ministers meeting in June 2025 did not announce a successor financing instrument in its place [TK]. The scorecard and the dispute mechanism are the tools on the table instead — signals meant to attract capital rather than public financing meant to build the infrastructure directly.

The financing gap left by a closed programme

A completed donor programme is not automatically replaced. The Trade Facilitation Programme funded, among other things, technical assistance for customs authorities and support for four border posts on the North-South Corridor — the kind of investment regional operators depend on but rarely fund themselves, since border infrastructure sits on public land and requires sovereign or multilateral capital. With that programme's mandate finished, the question for financiers and operators alike is which institution, if any, picks up equivalent technical assistance and capital for the next phase of border modernisation.

Ministers' communique from the June meeting did not name a successor funding vehicle for that specific workstream [TK]. That absence matters commercially: firms that had begun planning around continued EU-backed technical support at particular border posts now face uncertainty about whether that support continues, pauses, or shifts to a different funder entirely.

The Investment Climate Scorecard as a bankability signal

The newly adopted scorecard, built with the World Bank and OECD alongside the EU, is designed to give investors and lenders a comparable, cross-border measure of how bankable a SADC jurisdiction is — covering the kind of regulatory, legal and institutional variables that determine whether a project financier will extend capital into a market. SADC's summary of the ministerial meeting confirms the scorecard's adoption without detailing its scoring methodology or first results, which were not yet public at the time of writing.

For a regional financier or a corporate treasury deciding where to allocate capital across fifteen member states, a common scorecard would, once operational, reduce the due-diligence cost of comparing jurisdictions — assuming its methodology proves credible to the multilateral development banks whose co-financing regional projects often require. Until the first published scores are available, the tool remains a promise rather than a working input into capital-allocation decisions.

Currency risk and the cost of crossing borders

None of the meeting's decisions directly addressed the currency and payments friction that regional treasurers cite most often as a cost of doing business across SADC borders — the region still lacks a single settlement currency, and cross-border payments frequently route through correspondent banking relationships outside the continent. Ministers' focus on tariffs, protocols and a dispute mechanism leaves payments infrastructure as a parallel, unaddressed track, at least within the scope of this particular meeting's public record.

That silence is itself informative for a treasury function planning multi-country operations in SADC: currency conversion cost and settlement risk remain a planning variable that regional trade policy, as reported from this meeting, has not yet resolved. A regional dispute settlement mechanism, once developed, addresses contractual risk allocation; it does not by itself address the transactional cost of moving money between member states.

A dispute mechanism still under construction

Ministers directed a joint meeting of trade and legal experts to develop dispute settlement mechanisms for the bloc — an acknowledgement that SADC's trade instruments have historically lacked a clear, binding process for resolving disagreements between member states or between a state and a private investor. For lenders and insurers pricing political and commercial risk on cross-border projects, the existence of a credible, enforceable dispute mechanism is often a precondition for extending cover or capital at favourable terms.

The directive is a starting point rather than a finished instrument: a joint meeting of experts has been instructed to develop the mechanism, not to finalise it. Financiers assessing SADC-wide project risk should treat the current absence of a binding dispute process as unchanged until that expert work concludes and its recommendations are adopted.

What comes next

The test that follows this meeting is whether the Investment Climate Scorecard publishes its first jurisdiction-level scores, and whether any institution steps forward to fund the next phase of border and customs infrastructure now that the EU-backed programme has closed. A parallel test is the pace of the legal experts' work on dispute settlement, since project financiers typically price risk conservatively until a binding mechanism exists rather than one still in development.

For a regional financier or corporate treasury, the decision this meeting supports is preparatory rather than immediate: begin tracking the scorecard's first release and the successor financing arrangement for border infrastructure, both of which will shape where capital can move at reasonable cost across SADC in the months ahead.