By Andrew Wasike

NAIROBI, Kenya

Countries in East Africa lose more than $500 million in tax revenue every year due to illicit trade -- including counterfeiting and tax evasion -- a high-level summit heard on Friday.

East African Business Council Chief Executive Lilian Awinja told the meeting in Nairobi, governments in the Horn of Africa region needed to ensure the practice is a thing of the past as total tax losses from illicit trade continued to increase.

“We want to enhance information exchange, including educating the public on this to ensure that they don’t promote illicit trade unknowingly. We also need our leaders to come up with strict policies that will identify, prosecute and discourage such vices.

“A lot more still ought to be done to win the fight against illicit trade… [the] evaluation of illicit trade and its effects is challenging because it operates outside the law, making it hard to have accurate data on its scale.”

Executive Director of Kenya’s Anti-Counterfeit Agency, John Akoten, said his organization was drafting a commercial bench book, a document which will be used by the Kenyan justice system in identifying unlawful trade practices.

Smuggling and tax evasion also featured highly in discussions by businesspeople and government officials at the two-day regional conference which brought together delegates from Kenya, Tanzania, Rwanda, Burundi and Uganda.

The conference promised to come up with permanent solutions to the ever-growing issue of substandard and counterfeit products in East Africa.

The East African region is made of about 150 million people who integrate mainly through intraregional trade; over the years the market has been flooded by counterfeit and substandard products which have robbed businesses and governments of revenue.