Mr. Paddy Maguinness:

Thank you, Vice Chairman. I am afraid my presentation might be somewhat disordered, as I have forgotten my glasses and am unable to read the document I have prepared. The submission, copies of which have been circulated to members, basically sets out the logic behind how Traidlinks sees the world and how it is evolving. We describe ourselves as a business-led, not-for-profit organisation. We are not quite a non-governmental organisation because we are involved in so many private-sector activities. This causes some confusion in the countries in which we work. We are a registered charity but prefer the label of "business-led not-for-profit" because the whole idea of Traidlinks is about involving and engaging the private sector in international development. It is about working with governments and businesses.

As members will see from the list of organisations represented on our board, there would be potential for serious damage to the economy of this country if all of our board members were on the same flight to Uganda. We have representatives of Bewley's Limited, Barry's Tea, Tullow Oil, United Drug, Bimeda Ireland and Ion Equity. In addition, Mr. Patrick Bitature, chairman of the Uganda Investment Authority, is a member of the board. It is a very unusual organisation in that sense, being driven by the private sector and funded by Irish Aid, with additional funding from Tullow Oil and TradeMark East Africa.

In a nutshell, one can look at Africa in two ways. On the one hand, we have all the bad news such as the failure to reach targets under the millennium development goals. Members of the committee will be very familiar with everything that is not being achieved. On the other side of the coin, as illustrated by the statistics I have included in my submission from a report by the McKinsey Global Institute entitled Lions on the Move, there is enormous potential in the growth of Africa's economies, rising GDP and so on. Just as there are two ways of looking at Africa, I have often observed that there are two views of the world. The European view of development is very much focused on health, education and services. The idea is to build good governance, judicial systems and so on and, coming out of that, we then build an economy. The Chinese, on the other hand, consider this a novel view for the Europeans to take given that European societies did not themselves develop in that way. It was the other way around, in fact, with somebody building a raft at a fjord in a river and somebody else opening a shebeen next door. Before we know it we have a business and then somebody says we must have a church and a school. That is how it went. On that basis, the Chinese reverse the European approach and argue that the economy comes first and the services sector will follow. They wonder why we insist on doing it the other way around in Africa. It is a simplistic way of looking at the world, but it also presents us with a challenge. As I have pointed out in the submission, the White Paper could be likened to a Rubik's cube, with each side representing the different areas of action. The difficulty arises because people tend to focus on one side of the cube, whether health, education, HIV-AIDS or something else. The trick is to focus on all aspects. Otherwise, the blues will be lined up but the reds will be all over the place. That will get us nowhere.

I recently invited a senior consultant from Accenture, a company renowned for its analytical prowess, to come to Traidlinks. He asked me a very simple question which, he said, he asked of all international NGOs, large and small. The question was, since people in Africa tend to be poor because they do not have any money, what is our organisation doing to solve that problem? He remarked that people often give him lectures about health and education in response to that question, but he always replies that those issues could be solved if the money was there. It is a simple proposition with a challenging implementation. The question we are asking ourselves is how we can create wealth and jobs. It is complex in one sense but simple in another.

Mr. Conall O'Caoimh observed that trade is essential for Africa, specifically value-added trade. Africa has been trading forever, from its slaves to its coffee, but there has been no value accruing to the continent. That is a particular problem. We in Traidlinks believe in trade, business creation, wealth creation and support for small and medium-sized enterprises. We position ourselves just above the co-operative level - that is, not getting down to farmer-to-farmer level. Our main focus is on small and medium-sized business but not necessarily at the micro-finance level, in which lots of people are already involved. Our challenge, in short, is to help businesses to grow. In Uganda people often say they need more entrepreneurs. In fact, that is the last thing the country needs because there are probably 39 million entrepreneurs. What is actually needed are structured businesses with structured finance. We need people in those businesses who know about marketing, communications, technology and business processes. This is the dynamic in which we see Traidlinks positioning itself. We are not operating as an NGO, coming in and saying we will set up programmes. Rather, we are working on a partnership model with key institutions. Our key interlocutors in Uganda are the Uganda Export Promotion Board and the Uganda Investment Authority, which are the equivalent, respectively, of An Bord Bia and Enterprise Ireland. They are, however, very weak institutions. The Uganda Export Promotion Board, for example, has a budget of some €300,000 to promote exports from a country of 39 million people. Compare this with An Bord Bia, which has a budget of €45 million to promote food products from Ireland and within Ireland. That is a good example of the structural problems within the business sector in Africa. There are, in fact, very few business support services or Government institutions of any weight. This is to some extent a symptom of development, in that whatever resources are available are going into education, health and so on. The business sector, on the other hand, and the institutions that support it have been neglected. Those institutions are simply not in a fit state to help companies to get established and grow. Hence we have had the flood of commodities out of the country through the various extractive industries and the Chinese coming in and taking whatever there is to be taken.

Traidlinks has done a significant amount of work in this country in marketing African products. We created a brand called Heart of Africa and imported large numbers of products into Ireland which were sold in Tesco, Superquinn, SuperValu and so on. This project hit a wall for two reasons, the first being the recession. I am sure Mr. O'Caoimh spoke about how difficult it is to get products into economies that are experiencing recession. The second factor was supply. People in Uganda were delighted to have a container of dried mango ready to ship to Ireland.

However, we explained that they needed to send another one the week after and another the week after that, but they said they had no money. When one examines the business, one realises it is not a money problem but another issue, that is, a management problem. Some people always say it is a money problem. That is what has come out of Traidlinks.

Our core function was to regroup and rethink. We realised we should get companies to focus on regional trade, that is, trade between Uganda and Rwanda, between Uganda and Tanzania and between Tanzania and Kenya. How do we help them to do this? It is an easier step because the destination is next door and they speak the same languages and so on. We have set up a market link programme funded by Irish Aid and, increasingly, TradeMark East Africa. It is working well. A trade mission from Uganda is in Rwanda. It was organised by Traidlinks and the Uganda Export Promotion Board. The group is in Rwanda trading everything from women's cosmetics, cables and plastic jerry cans to foam mattresses. It is basic stuff, but all of it is cross-border and has been produced in Uganda.

The programme is expanding to become a regional programme. The Rwandans like it and want to have it the other way around also. We have run a pilot scheme in Rwanda and are now working with TradeMark East Africa. I draw the attention of committee members to the group in case they are unaware of it. It is a new grouping of donors driven by the British, the Danes, the Dutch, the Swedes and the Finns. It is only four years old, but it has a budget of approximately $500 million. They are creating economic corridors in east Africa, deepening ports, developing infrastructure, cross-border trading, information technology systems and figuring out how to bring the barriers down. If it takes a container 17 stops to get from Mombasa to Kampala, what are the 17 stops? There are two official stops along the route and 15 for corruption. The question is how to stop this and iron it out of the system.

This is what TradeMark East Africa is doing. In one sense, it is doing macro stuff. We are working with the organisation because we believe Ireland has a particular niche in this regard at firm level. I am referring to when the rubber hits the road. I put it to representatives of TradeMark East Africa that they could build infrastructure, carry out macro projects, deepen ports and so on, but the question is whether this is providing a platform for imports or a launching pad for exports. If a trader cannot get a label on his or her product or cannot secure the correct safety regulation, certificate of origin or certificate of compliance for the European Union, he or she cannot export anything. He or she cannot get beyond first base and add value. One always ends up with these commodities.

With TradeMark East Africa, we are focusing on the firm, how to improve the quality of the product, how to have people trained and how to build their confidence because much of this is about the confidence of the people concerned to export. The other major question is whether they are making money. Many wish to export, but if they are asked whether they are making any money on the product, they say they are unsure. Why would one want to export something if one is unsure whether it is making money? These are the practical things we are about as an organisation. That is what we do with the market link programme and it is expanding. Our problem is that it is too small. It should be increased by a factor of ten if we are to be serious about it. We need to scale and crank it up.

We are working with another unusual partner, that is, the extractive industries in oil and gas production in Uganda. Much oil has been discovered in east Africa. It has been discovered in Ethiopia; oil is pouring out of Sudan and there are massive reserves in Kenya. Reserves of 4 billion barrels have been recognised in Uganda, or between 2 and 4 billion barrels. As we know in Ireland, one never quite knows the right figure and one is always unsure, but we know it is big figure. The oil companies are investing between $6 billion and $8 billion in Uganda. The return on this in terms of revenue streams to the government is in the region of hundreds of billions, or however many hundreds one wishes to put on it. That is its scale and it will be over a long period.

We see the oil and gas sector as a catalyst for developing the economy; we do not see it as the economy. Oil and gas production needs standards and skills and so on at international standards level. If one is seeking a job as a welder with Tullow Oil or Total in Uganda, one had better have a Lloyds certificate. One cannot simply suggest one has welded a number of gates and now one is available to weld a pipeline for a company. That does not work. Everything will rise. It is similar to what happened in Ireland when the transnationals came here. One of the things that happened to us was that standards and the bar were raised. We see the industry as catalytic, which is why we work closely with it.

We are working with the oil and gas companies on their supply chain because they will employ approximately 15,000 people in the coming years. This means 15,000 people will need to be trained to international standards. We are working with them on their sectoral needs, but we are also working with them on agricultural issues and how to get the spin-off from what they are doing to tumble into agriculture. If an oil or gas company is training a person to fix a JCB, why can it not train the same person to fix a tractor? Africa is plagued by a lack of technical assistance. One problem in Africa is that people tend to head to universities before they head to the welding shop. They want a degree before they have a certificate in welding. We see the oil and gas sector as a catalyst to make it good for people to believe their future is as a construction worker, a welder or a plumber. We also believe there is a responsibility on the oil and gas sector. Africa has been plagued by the resource curse of oil. It has gone over the top of countries and the economies have benefited little. We work closely with Tullow Oil on national and local content and how we should progress these aspects. We discuss how such companies should invest because it is their business to invest in this area and we are there as a partner to help them. That is where we see ourselves going.

Those of us involved in Traidlinks know the scale is ridiculously small. We have a turnover of $1.6 million and it may be $2 million in a couple of years, but we know that is rather small, given the scale of what we need to do. We have considered the White Paper and made recommendations that members of the committee can read. If there are six sides to the Rubiks cube, the question is whether they are given equal weighting or is one side given more. There is a need for a discussion, debate and to have a strategy fleshed out around it because therein lies the future. Truthfully, if we do this right in Africa, there is a future for Ireland also in engaging with the continent. Everyone one meets in Africa has been educated by the Irish. They have health services in place. I do not normally quote President Musevani, but at a meeting one day he put it to me that the Irish had helped them to build their education and health systems and if the Irish wished to come and do business and help them to build businesses, the door was open.