This week’s US-Africa Business Summit kicked off on 6 May with the official launch of the Tanzanian trade office in Dallas, a binational initiative that its founders hope will serve as a model for other African countries. The new initiative brings together the private and public sectors from the US and the East African nation.
Led by the Tanzanian American Chamber of Commerce, a Texas non-profit organisation, the new Tanzanian trade office seeks to capitalise on growing US investor interest in Tanzania under reformist president Samia Suluhu Hassan. Dallas Mayor Eric Johnson and the Tanzanian ambassador to the US, Elsie Kanza led the ribbon-cutting ceremony in the packed atrium of the glass Prism office building in the heart of the city’s Dallas International District.
“Dallas is the perfect city to facilitate international commerce on behalf of the entire United States,” Johnson told attendees, pointing to the city’s large African-born population and the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport’s ranking as the third-busiest in the world, behind Atlanta and Dubai but ahead of London and Tokyo.
Ben Kazora, the chamber’s Tanzanian-born founder and president, says the business group’s corporate members will help American investors navigate the Tanzanian market and connect them with potential partners and government agencies, both in the US and Tanzania.
He describes his chamber as essentially an extension of the Tanzanian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and says it works closely with the American Chamber of Commerce in Tanzania (AmCham-TZ), and by extension with the US Embassy in Dar es Salaam, enabling “collaboration across all sides”.
Bringing together Tanzanian and US businesses
“This becomes a permanent body that allows for actual trade, because the [Tanzanian] embassy doesn’t trade,” Kazora tells The Africa Report.
The trade mission will also serve a unique advocacy role, pushing for legislative and regulatory priorities.
“The embassy has to stand for Tanzania, but we are standing for business,” he says. “Our members will actually be the ones who are carrying out all those policies and will become the voice from the private sector side.”
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Kazora adds that Kanza is a permanent adviser to the chamber and was “integral” to the trade office launch, working with Johnson’s office to make it happen.
The office “brings together Tanzanian and American businesses interested in building ties between our two nations, and through our two nations to their regions,” Kanza said.
Eye on Tanzania, gateway to East Africa
The launch is the latest in a series of US engagements with Tanzania, the country seen as a gateway to the East African market of about 500 million people and a major mining, tourism and agriculture economy in its own right.
US Vice President Kamala Harris made the country one of the three stops on her tour of Africa last year. As part of the visit, she announced that the US Exim Bank would facilitate up to $500m in US export financing to Tanzania.
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Months later, US Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo and Tanzanian Minister for Industry and Trade Ashatu Kijaji signed a memorandum of cooperation to establish the US-Tanzania commercial dialogue.
The opening of the trade office symbolises the “commitment to that deepening commercial engagement”, says Katherine Ho, the State Department’s regional director based in Houston.
Florizelle Liser, president of the Corporate Council on Africa putting on this week’s summit, called Tanzania a “priority country” in her address to attendees.
“We recognise this remarkable economic and political progress,” she said, “as well as the growing interest from the US government and American businesses.”
Dallas goes global
The trade office is also a breakthrough for the city of Dallas as it seeks to capitalise on its large and growing international population to position itself as a global player.
The Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area is home to more than 99,000 African-born immigrants, according to US Census data for 2015-2019, behind only New York and Washington. The new trade office is located in the heart of the Dallas International District, a 450-acre project that seeks to “unite and amplify perspectives, voices and investments of our region’s fast-growing global community” and serve as an ”engine for economic growth and a diverse cultural destination”.