DFID-SA’s 2006 regional plan identified three broad areas for DFID engagement at the regional level: growth, jobs and equity; resilient livelihoods, including food security, water, climate change and infectious diseases; and peace and security.

The overall rationale for DFID-SA’s focus on promoting stable and inclusive growth in the region is the recognition that growth has a central role to play in delivering poverty reduction aims in sustainable ways. This role can manifest itself through direct effects, generating increased employment and productive opportunities for poor people, but also through indirect effects by, for instance, increasing the revenues available to governments for targeted social spending and public services.  Growth is seen as a means to an end – poverty reduction – rather than as an end in itself.

Key constraints to growth in the region include a need for greater intra-regional trade and broader access to international markets. Underdeveloped infrastructure is a constraint to trade and to economic activity more generally.

DFID-SA’s recently approved £100m Trademark programme will address some of the key constraints to trade through helping to achieve: improved efficiency of regional trade infrastructure; harmonised regional trade facilitation systems; reduced tariff and non-tariff barriers to trade; improved compliance with export standards in pro-poor agricultural export value chains.

Market failures such as lack of information can also impede private sector growth. And there is a need for a more stable and inclusive financial sector if the benefits of increased growth are to be felt by the poor. DFID-SA is planning two regional programmes on private sector development, and to promote better and sustainable access to financial services for poor people (building on our current ComMark and FinMark programmes). These will result in: more poor people across Southern Africa having access to bank accounts; improved access to credit for SMEs and farmers; reduced transaction costs for sending remittances in the SADC region; and increased incomes and employment opportunities for poor people through regional value chains.