TradeMark East Africa (TMEA) has partnered with the East African Tea Trade Association (EATTA) to digitize the weekly Mombasa tea auction. The partnership seeks to automate the trade through the formation of the Integrated Tea Trading System (ITTS).
Additionally, the digitization (ITTS) seeks to fill gaps in the current procedures, which are done manually including membership and cataloging.
The partnership has already received funding from the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA).
The disadvantages of the manual system include high transaction costs for traders, delays in payments and exportation, as well as limited timeline for trading. Furthermore, buyers have to make their payments manually, and then the tea has to be exported or be transported back to Nairobi for value addition, which takes a lot of time.
Additionally, the manual procedure involves a couple of middle-men, ranging from producers, warehouses, brokers, buyers, and middlemen. In the long run, the trickle down effect is that the farmers have little say in the prices of their tea.
Digitization, therefore, will enable farmers to use their mobile phones to trace the movement of their tea across factories and shipping companies. They will also be able to analyse the market trends affecting tea trade in the world.
We are funding EATTA with $2 million to create a robust platform that will deliver a digital information flow of buying and selling tea. We have been working with EATTA to re-engineer all the services that are manual, and paper based, and move them in to the digital platform, named The Integrated Tea Trading System. This will make it easy for people to share information.
Alban Odhiambo, TMEA Director.
According to EATTA, the automation will drive tea sales to more than $20 million weekly. This will be achieved through time reduction in the tea trading cycle and cost reduction in the trading process.
The weekly Mombasa Tea Auction encompasses the ale of teas from various countries such as Kenya, Mozambique, Tanzania, Malawi, Burundi, Ethiopia, DRC, Rwanda, Madagascar and Uganda.
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