SASC pushes collaboration agenda

The Southern Africa Shippers’ Council (SASC) – since moving from a part-time secretariat to a full-time one – is engaging with the industry to ensure a “collective voice” in growing regional trade and addressing supply chain challenges in the region. “With our full-time regional focus, we believe we can unlock greater regional integration and work with the industry – through engagement with government, industry bodies and leaders – to grow our global competitiveness as a region,” said SASC chief executive Brenda Horne Ferreira. She noted that to increase global trade with the southern African region, as well as stimulate intra-regional trade, the industry needed to create an environment where it was as easy to trade with the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) as with South Africa. Horne Ferreira pointed to the World Bank’s latest Logistics Performance Index (LPI), highlighting major discrepancies in southern African logistics performance (the DRC, Mozambique and Zimbabwe are the lowest performing countries within southern Africa). “To address this requires real collaboration which can only be achieved if government and the private sector work together to establish a common set of standards,” she added. Horne Ferreira told FTW that SASC had been involved in 97 highlevel national, regional and global industry engagements since the permanent office was opened in Johannesburg on July 1 this year. “We see ourselves as aggregators of innovative collaboration across all modes of transport. We firmly believe that if you are not part of the collaboration platform, you are part of the problem,” said Horne Ferreira. She noted that the SASC’s transformation process had been thoroughly researched and benchmarked against world best practice for other global shippers' councils that had already begun moving towards advocating integration and collaboration. “By benchmarking against regional and global best practices, we are already more competitive on the global stage,” said Horne Ferreira. The SASC mandate to secure funding to expand the office and appoint a strong operations, administration and technical advisement team is “progressing and is on track”, said Horne Ferreira. “Overall, the industry has been overwhelmingly positive to the SASC transformation and we have signed up a number of new members, including from the southern African region,” she said. INSERT & CAPTION If you’re not part of the collaboration platform, you are part of the problem. – Brenda Horne Ferreira