FESARTA has commenced with what it hopes will become a close working relationship with the International Road Transport Union (IRU) and the North Star Alliance.

While we’re excited about working with the Geneva-based IRU, we’re not entirely sure how closer alignment and deeper collaboration with the union will be received by various transport associations in SADC, the East African Community, and COMESA.

On the other hand, we appreciate the IRU’s eagerness – and readiness – to get involved with us. The IRU has established transport systems worldwide and we feel that introducing their systems won’t require us to reinvent the wheel.

The IRU is a world road transport organisation that upholds the interests of bus, coach, taxi, and truck operators to ensure economic growth and prosperity through the sustainable mobility of people and goods by road.

It is working with a range of stakeholders throughout Africa to explore the possibility of implementing the world’s only global transit system, TIR, as a transit solution for African trade and transport corridors. It has engaged, in particular, with Kenya, the East African Community, and the Northern, Trans-Caprivi, and Maputo Corridors in Southern and Eastern Africa.

We believe FESARTA needs to align itself with a global player and the IRU fits the bill. The same could be said of the North Star Alliance, which is keen to roll-out anti-retro virals on the North-South Corridor and which seeks assistance from FESARTA in this regard.

The previously used GPS North-South Corridor Monitoring System, pioneered by TradeMarkSA and others, is being recommissioned. Our intention is to replace it with an updated system, while adding several new features to further its capabilities.

Ultimately, we want to create an easy to use and affordable information-sharing platform for the transport and logistics industry in Africa. Using an Android platform, we plan to incorporate highly relevant corridor information, including wellness centres and truck stops, and to have this information on hand for drivers and transport operators.

In the latter regard, the North Star Alliance is a powerful ally. It takes converted shipping containers, which it refers to as ’blue boxes’, to hard-to-reach people across Africa. These blue shipping containers house clinics, which deliver public health programmes to people with increased health risks, such as truck drivers and sex workers, and primary health care to communities with limited or no access to medical services.

Through the IRU and FESARTA, we believe the continent will be better plugged in to the global economy and better placed to promote regional development and integration, especially along regional trade corridors.

The IRU’s transit system is the only global intermodal trade facilitation tool that can underpin the growth of Africa’s rapidly developing deep water ports and national road networks. It is the ideal tool to support this development through stronger regional and global trade harmonisation and transport facilitation. This will likely usher in a new era of growth and prosperity and bring economic benefit to Africa and its international trading partners.