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The One Thing the SADC Summit Should Have Put at the Top of the Agenda Was Small Business

17 August 2026

By Faisal Mkhize, Managing Executive for Business Development at Absa Business Banking

Much has been said about the 46th SADC Summit and what it may mean for the 16 countries trying, with varying degrees of success, to prise integration out of the communiqués and declarations that have arguably carried the idea further than the region in practice sometimes has. Somewhere in the rush to make sense of the bigger questions around Southern Africa’s place in a more fractious world, however, a smaller idea was buried beneath the headlines. Smaller only in the amount of attention it received because, taken seriously, it asks us to reconsider who this project is actually being built for and where its economic weight will ultimately have to come from.

A few days before the heads of state gathered for the formal business of it all, President Cyril Ramaphosa said during a public lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal that “Southern Africa’s industrial revolution will ultimately not be driven by the large conglomerates listed on stock exchanges, but by the tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses that bring innovation, agility and competitiveness to the economy.”

It is an interesting idea and a Herculean task in roughly equal measure, though also the direction Southern Africa should be travelling in, because the businesses being placed at the heart of that future still operate in a regional economy that becomes markedly less hospitable the moment they try to grow beyond home.

SADC has not, of course, spent the past three decades in limbo, and it would be churlish to pretend otherwise when so much of the cooperation machinery has been assembled over that time, even if a few of its more ambitious parts have acquired the slightly permanent air of work still in progress (the stubborn customs union comes to mind here). What has been harder to shake is the habit of imagining growth from the top down, with progress judged largely by what states agree and by the movement of firms already big enough to take advantage of those arrangements. Small businesses have featured in the policy architecture, certainly, but rarely as the economic engine around which the wider project should be designed, even though the weighting of the economy has been telling us for some time that they ought to be.

SMEs account for more than 90% of business establishments across SADC and more than 60% of employment, which makes their relatively faint presence in cross-border commerce all the more striking. Their contribution to exports is estimated at around 12%, a figure that looks particularly anaemic beside the European Union, where SMEs account for roughly 34% of exports directly and as much as 58% once their contribution through larger exporters is traced through the supply chain. Even ASEAN, whose economies offer a more useful comparison in several respects, draws close to 30% of its exports from SMEs.

The good news is that there is now a more deliberate attempt to confront exactly this problem.

SADC’s SME Development and Competitiveness Strategy, taken forward in Madagascar last year and now guiding the period to 2029, is probably the clearest effort yet to gather the scattered pieces of SME development into one regional view. The strategy focuses on improving the policy environment in which SMEs operate, strengthening entrepreneurship and skills, expanding access to technology and support infrastructure, opening more routes to market, and improving access to finance. If implemented well, it would be a decisive step in creating a more enabling environment for SME growth across the region, though in truth it would still only take us part of the way.

The real swing would come in making that thinking far more deliberate at the level of SMEs, by seeing SADC’s economies less as neighbouring markets competing for the same opportunities and more as parts of a wider productive system in which different strengths can reinforce one another.

Too often, progress is seen through a nationalistic lens, with each government trying to deepen its own industrial base and attract investment on its own terms. There is an understandable logic to that, considering the unique pressure each country faces to create jobs and sustain economic growth, but taken too far it can leave sixteen markets trying to reproduce the same capabilities in parallel, and often in competition, when some of what they are trying to build already exists elsewhere in the region and could be put to work more deliberately across borders.

The ambition would no longer be to help a business in one country sell more into another; it would be to build regional value chains in which small businesses from different markets participate according to what they do well, combining those strengths into products and services that can compete more convincingly beyond the region.

In many ways, that is the kind of economic behaviour AfCFTA will eventually depend on anyway, except that Southern Africa has the advantage of being able to practise the habit at a more immediate scale first. Ask many SMEs what AfCFTA means for them today and they are likely to tell you it still feels too large and too abstract to make much difference to their businesses. Getting this right within SADC could begin to change that by giving them something more tangible: the experience of seeing that growth across borders is actually possible.

And the case for getting on with it has a much sharper edge because sovereignty these days is being negotiated as much through economic dependence as through politics.

In the same lecture, President Ramaphosa argued that “the welfare of our people and the sovereignty and security of our nations require that we work with greater diligence and purpose to build an integrated Southern African market.” Southern Africa will always trade with the world, and should, but there is a difference between being open to the world and being structurally exposed to it. The more of the region’s productive life that can be carried through businesses trading with one another, the less every external shock has to arrive here with quite the same force.

A denser network of small businesses trading across SADC would not make the region self-sufficient, nor is that the goal. What it would do is anchor more of Southern Africa’s economic agency in the ordinary workings of its own businesses, with value created in one market feeding activity in another and giving the region a thicker commercial base from which to deal with the rest of the world.

17 August 2026

By Faisal Mkhize, Managing Executive for Business Development at Absa Business Banking

Much has been said about the 46th SADC Summit and what it may mean for the 16 countries trying, with varying degrees of success, to prise integration out of the communiqués and declarations that have arguably carried the idea further than the region in practice sometimes has. Somewhere in the rush to make sense of the bigger questions around Southern Africa’s place in a more fractious world, however, a smaller idea was buried beneath the headlines. Smaller only in the amount of attention it received because, taken seriously, it asks us to reconsider who this project is actually being built for and where its economic weight will ultimately have to come from.

A few days before the heads of state gathered for the formal business of it all, President Cyril Ramaphosa said during a public lecture at the University of KwaZulu-Natal that “Southern Africa’s industrial revolution will ultimately not be driven by the large conglomerates listed on stock exchanges, but by the tens of thousands of small and medium-sized businesses that bring innovation, agility and competitiveness to the economy.”

It is an interesting idea and a Herculean task in roughly equal measure, though also the direction Southern Africa should be travelling in, because the businesses being placed at the heart of that future still operate in a regional economy that becomes markedly less hospitable the moment they try to grow beyond home.

SADC has not, of course, spent the past three decades in limbo, and it would be churlish to pretend otherwise when so much of the cooperation machinery has been assembled over that time, even if a few of its more ambitious parts have acquired the slightly permanent air of work still in progress (the stubborn customs union comes to mind here). What has been harder to shake is the habit of imagining growth from the top down, with progress judged largely by what states agree and by the movement of firms already big enough to take advantage of those arrangements. Small businesses have featured in the policy architecture, certainly, but rarely as the economic engine around which the wider project should be designed, even though the weighting of the economy has been telling us for some time that they ought to be.

SMEs account for more than 90% of business establishments across SADC and more than 60% of employment, which makes their relatively faint presence in cross-border commerce all the more striking. Their contribution to exports is estimated at around 12%, a figure that looks particularly anaemic beside the European Union, where SMEs account for roughly 34% of exports directly and as much as 58% once their contribution through larger exporters is traced through the supply chain. Even ASEAN, whose economies offer a more useful comparison in several respects, draws close to 30% of its exports from SMEs.

The good news is that there is now a more deliberate attempt to confront exactly this problem.

SADC’s SME Development and Competitiveness Strategy, taken forward in Madagascar last year and now guiding the period to 2029, is probably the clearest effort yet to gather the scattered pieces of SME development into one regional view. The strategy focuses on improving the policy environment in which SMEs operate, strengthening entrepreneurship and skills, expanding access to technology and support infrastructure, opening more routes to market, and improving access to finance. If implemented well, it would be a decisive step in creating a more enabling environment for SME growth across the region, though in truth it would still only take us part of the way.

The real swing would come in making that thinking far more deliberate at the level of SMEs, by seeing SADC’s economies less as neighbouring markets competing for the same opportunities and more as parts of a wider productive system in which different strengths can reinforce one another.

Too often, progress is seen through a nationalistic lens, with each government trying to deepen its own industrial base and attract investment on its own terms. There is an understandable logic to that, considering the unique pressure each country faces to create jobs and sustain economic growth, but taken too far it can leave sixteen markets trying to reproduce the same capabilities in parallel, and often in competition, when some of what they are trying to build already exists elsewhere in the region and could be put to work more deliberately across borders.

The ambition would no longer be to help a business in one country sell more into another; it would be to build regional value chains in which small businesses from different markets participate according to what they do well, combining those strengths into products and services that can compete more convincingly beyond the region.

In many ways, that is the kind of economic behaviour AfCFTA will eventually depend on anyway, except that Southern Africa has the advantage of being able to practise the habit at a more immediate scale first. Ask many SMEs what AfCFTA means for them today and they are likely to tell you it still feels too large and too abstract to make much difference to their businesses. Getting this right within SADC could begin to change that by giving them something more tangible: the experience of seeing that growth across borders is actually possible.

And the case for getting on with it has a much sharper edge because sovereignty these days is being negotiated as much through economic dependence as through politics.

In the same lecture, President Ramaphosa argued that “the welfare of our people and the sovereignty and security of our nations require that we work with greater diligence and purpose to build an integrated Southern African market.” Southern Africa will always trade with the world, and should, but there is a difference between being open to the world and being structurally exposed to it. The more of the region’s productive life that can be carried through businesses trading with one another, the less every external shock has to arrive here with quite the same force.

A denser network of small businesses trading across SADC would not make the region self-sufficient, nor is that the goal. What it would do is anchor more of Southern Africa’s economic agency in the ordinary workings of its own businesses, with value created in one market feeding activity in another and giving the region a thicker commercial base from which to deal with the rest of the world.