Standard Bank launched the African Trade Barometer (SB ATB), a quarterly index that provides dynamic and insightful analysis to promote the development of the African continent's trade ecosystem.

The aim of this initiative is to create a trade index for the continent to fill the gap in reliable information on the sector and to support and enable the growth of internal trade.

The SB ATB also aims to fill the lack of data on trade across the African continent by providing up-to-date information from surveys on companies' views of the environment in which they operate, their commercial behavior, commercial activities and their perceptions of trade.

According to Bernardo Aparício, the managing director of Inter-African, the tool is an excellent channel for Mozambican entrepreneurs, as well as other decision-makers, to identify business opportunities in the country in particular and on the African continent in general.

"The African Trade Barometer provides up-to-date information, obtained through surveys of companies, in which they comment on their perceptions of trade.

Above all, the index presents the opportunities that exist in Mozambique, thus exposing our entrepreneurs to partnerships within the continent," said Bernardo Aparício.

The launch was attended by Nuno Mapossa, an advisor to the Directorate General of the Agency for the Promotion of Investment and Exports (APIEX), who said that SB ATB will help to increase trade between African countries by disseminating information about domestic markets.

"We, as Africans, exchange or trade only 16%. The African continent represents 3% of international trade. There is a lot of room for trade. Africa has 1.3 trillion US dollars. In other words, there's a lot of money in Africa, but we don't do business with each other, and one of the reasons is a lack of information," he said.

Launched in 2022, the SB ATB is now in its third edition and covers seven broad thematic categories of data with an impact on trade, namely trade openness, access to finance, macroeconomic stability, infrastructure, foreign trade, governance and the economy and financial behavior of trade.

The third and most recent edition of SB ATB focuses on 10 countries, namely Angola, Ghana, Kenya, Mozambique, Namibia, Nigeria, South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia.

As far as Mozambique is concerned, the document points to our country's improvement in the overall SB ATB ranking, from sixth place in September 2022 to third.

The Mozambican business confidence index improved with a score of 59 in May 2023, slightly above the average of 58 for the SB ATB of 57 in September 2022.

The increase in GDP and net Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) flows that have recovered from the effects of the pandemic, as well as the share of trade in goods, driven by the increase in exports as a percentage of GDP, have a positive impact on the attractiveness of its trade capacity.

On the other hand, Mozambique's relatively high interest rates to contain rising domestic inflation, due to global inflation resulting from Russia's invasion of Ukraine, had a negative impact on the attractiveness of its trade capacity.

The country still faces a situation of poor infrastructure, as the companies surveyed considered this to be an obstacle to their operations. The supply of electricity and the state of the roads continue to be the worst perceived aspects in the country.