Beneficial Ties for Tea Communities in East Africa

The EU-EAC Market Access Upgrade Programme (MARKUP) strives to break the international trade barriers through awareness creation and improving market access of East African products to the regional and international markets.
Recently, the International Trade Centre (ITC) and the European Speciality Tea Association (ESTA) announced an agreement between ITC and the East African Tea Trade Association (EATTA) to explore the feasibility of establishing a regular market connection service promoting direct trade with global buyers of speciality teas.
Through EAC MARKUP, the platform will facilitate transactions of teas and a seller-buyer discovery and long-term relationship establishment, while promoting and advertising East African speciality teas to international markets.
The first part of this initiative is a competition with its leaders developing a categorisation system as well as training a regional and international jury panel to identify and select the best teas.
The competition will be followed by a pilot run to test the concept, absorb and analyse the process and results, and subsequently build a longer-term and more frequently held online marketplace.
The second component will be a marketplace with an online system to send the teas to market and promote the teas to buyers anywhere in the world. This will foster competitiveness and encourage a culture of production and trade of high-quality speciality teas as an alternative to CTC.
The first online sale is planned in late 2022. MARKUP calls upon tea sellers, speciality tea hunters and buyers not to miss this opportunity!
Read more about this project here.