The Southern Africa Trade Hub (SATH) will conduct a Diagnostic Trade and Integration study (DTIS) for Lesotho
The study comes at the request of the country's Ministry of Trade, Industry, Cooperatives and Marketing, according to SATH communications office in Botswana. A DTIS evaluates internal and external constraints on a country's integration into the world economy and recommends areas where technical assistance and policy actions can help the country overcome these barriers. It also analyses specific sectors of the economy as well as cross-cutting institutional issues such as market access, transportation and trade facilitation, standards, poverty and core trade policy.
The World Bank and UNDP have managed many of the DTISs conducted through the Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF). The EIF is a successor programme of the Integrated Framework (IF), which aims to support the integration of Least Developed Countries into the Multilateral Trading System by providing capacity building support. The main DTIS update mission to Lesotho is scheduled for January 2012. The draft of the DTIS update final report will be handed over to the Lesotho government.
Wallace Mawire
