Twenty-eight (28) percent of African countries interviewed within the recently published International Trade Centre (ITC) Small and Medium (SME) Competitiveness Survey sees environmental regulations adopted by national governments as an obstacle to their operations. Micro-sized firms, in general are more impacted than larger firms, and are also the ones that act less for reducing environmental risks.

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The term “trade finance” is commonly used to indicate a wide variety of instruments that are offered by banks and other financial institutions for facilitating trade operations, including purchase order finance; stock finance; structured commodity finance; invoice finance (e.g. discounting and factoring); supply chain finance; letters of credit (LCs), bonds, guarantees and other similar financial products.

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