European Trade and Development partners, TRIC meeting

CBI (the Centre for the Promotion of Imports from developing countries) is an agency of the Netherlands Ministry of Foreign Affairs. CBI hosted a very successful meeting between the key actors in Europe working with trade and development in the Hague on April 3-4th. The TRIC group with representatives from Belgium, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Switzerland has been meeting for several years and gives an impressive perspective on the different services and programs to help businesses in developing countries reach the global market. This was the first time the Germans participated in the meeting with participants representing SEQUA; GIZ and BGA. SEQUA is a development partner for German business and BGA is a member of SEQUA representing the German wholesalers. Like Chamber Trade, SEQUA was founded by chambers of commerce which want to engage in trade and development projects. SEQUA also specifically promotes imports from developing countries. SEQUA is partly owned by the German government through GIZ.

We congratulate Norway and the BMO Virke which has launched its women’s entrepreneurship program in East Africa co-funded by Norad.

As usual we were all impressed by the CBI which is launching its new innovative platform to serve businesses in developing countries with market intelligence and EU-market insight.  CBI supports exports from 48 developing countries in 27 sectors with its services!

Could this bring inspiration to the Swedish government, Sida and other agencies on how to work more pro-actively promoting trade and development together with the business sector and broadening our Swedish narrow focus on export promotion, traditional industries and the BRIC-countries?