NTFII gets more than a passing grade when it comes to identifying barriers to growth and giving Trade Support Institutions (TSIs) the know-how to tackle these barriers, according to Dick de Man, Deputy Managing Director at the Netherlands' Centre for the Promotion of Imports from Developing Countries.
‘If I look from the perspective of being very focused, addressing and focusing on the most important constraints, strengthening the organisations that can do something about these constraints, getting commitment from all the stakeholders based on a true-needs assessment, to really know what's going on, the score would be an 8,’ De Man said.
NTFII helps the CBI, an agency of the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, to achieve its mission of promoting sustainable economic development in non-industrialised countries by helping them increase exports. The programme carries a distinct Dutch flavour in that the five nations that are part of NTFII are among the Netherlands’ 15 priority countries.
Dutch development-aid policy
‘The programme directly relates to one of the central themes of our government’s developing aid policy,’ De Man said. ‘We strongly believe that private-sector development is the engine for sustainable economic growth. It creates self-reliance of the entrepreneurs, and through self-reliance, economic development can be achieved. ITC and CBI have a very good track record in contributing to sustainable development.’
While CBI and ITC have worked together in the past, their current partnership in NTFII took a new turn. They structured the programme to strengthen TSIs so they can take the lead to create a better enabling environment, said De Man, who also heads CBI's Research and Development division.
‘Projects within previous NTF programmes were rather fragmented, not focused, no RBM structure underneath,’ he explained. ‘We decided to organise NTFII in a very targeted and focused way in the sense that we have chosen particular value chains, particular countries and to focus on those value chains, to ascertain what the obstacles are for connection with international markets and to build a programme around those obstacles.’
Redefining cooperation
The result, he says, is that CBI and ITC have together taken a ‘major step’ not only in terms of the approach they chose, but also by redefining their relationship to each other.
‘We have established a very solid governance structure which was not in place before,’ De Man said. ‘We found out that you can't do these things together unless you have very clear-cut rules of the game, a very clear-cut division of the roles and responsibilities, so on all levels, we have divided tasks of both organisations so each of them according to this governance structure can do their job in which they are complementary, in which they are best.’ Close collaboration has also been established with the Permanent Mission of the Netherlands in Geneva.
CBI and ITC are also working together in fields beyond NFTII, such as collaborating in other countries and the creating market intelligence for SME exporters.