Intra-Africa Trade Can Boost Africa’s Economy-DHL

Hennie Heymans

African countries need to focus on Intra-Trade and rid some of the barriers affecting cross border trade for the continent to realize substantial economic growth, says one of the leading global brand in the logistics industry, DHL. 

DHL Express Set to Support SMEs Growth

Gavyn Symons 

DHL Express is ready to promote growth of Small Scale Businesses (SMEs) in Malawi and across Africa.

Newly appointed Manager for DHL Express Malawi, Gavyn Symons disclosed that the company is introducing a partnership that will help SMEs with information on customs, and other import and export regulations while enabling them experience easy and affordable service of sending and receiving goods around the world.

"We will be looking at doing this from global as well as regional and country prospective." he said 

"We want to partner with the SME's and we want to make ourselves readily accessible and available to SME's so that they can come to us for advice especially when it comes to import duties, customs, regulations, compliances."

Symons whose top priorities as Managing Director said includes to grow market share, particularly within the SME industry, and to continue drive service-related initiatives to ensure superior service to its customers, emphasized that this support will offer SMEs "peace of mind" when they send or import their shipments around the world.

DHL Express Marketing and Communications Manager for Southern Africa, Khanyi Mamba, explains that DHL is very much focused with developing SME's across Africa because the company realized the existing need for educating SME's.

"Generally SMEs don't know for example if they want to import a box from UK. What does it mean in terms of customs and duties and how does that implicates ones profit." She said

"At DHL Express we are going to introduce the programme called Certified International Specialists for SMEs (CIS) where we are going to be doing workshops for SMEs in order to educate them on such kind of information" added Mamba

She then said "We want to help develop businesses in Africa, that's the main focus of the programme and we don't want to be seen only as a service provider but as a business partner. We want see businesses to grow in Africa and we want to support local businesses that are really small businesses."

According to Mamba the programme will be free of charge for the SMEs starting in South Africa towards the end of this year, then scale down to other parts of Africa including Malawi.