EAC e-commerce: what the revised baseline needs to show

Summary

The EAC says Partner States reviewed and updated baseline data at a meeting in Dar es Salaam on 13–15 October 2026, drawing on national consultations in September and October. Its 16 October announcement does not include the revised values.
The 2022 strategy already separates different kinds of e-commerce activity and assigns reporting responsibilities. Whether the refreshed baseline allows a meaningful comparison between countries remains to be shown in the published numbers.

An online order can end with cash changing hands at the doorstep. That makes the order and the payment two different things to count. Add a border between buyer and seller, and there is a third question. A regional statistic that blurs those distinctions can look impressively comprehensive while saying very little about how people actually trade.

That is the practical problem behind a rather administrative announcement from the East African Community (EAC). In its account of a 13–15 October meeting in Dar es Salaam, published on 16 October, the EAC says Partner States reviewed and updated the baseline for monitoring their regional e-commerce strategy. Recommendations from national engagement platforms held in September and October fed into the work.

A baseline gives later results something to be measured against. Revising it can therefore be important even when no new shop opens and no parcel moves. But the announcement provides no updated values, country breakdown, reference periods, measurement definitions or source table. It reports the revision; it does not let an outside reader reproduce it. That is a limit of this announcement, not evidence that the EAC publishes no relevant statistics elsewhere.

Five questions, not one growth story

The region is not starting from a blank sheet. Its e-commerce strategy, adopted on 12 July 2022, proposes several distinct measures: the share of individuals, households and businesses using e-commerce, with age, gender and income breakdowns; the share of purchases completed using electronic payment rather than cash on delivery; online selling or order-taking by business size; e-commerce's share of business turnover; and the proportion of e-commerce conducted between Partner States.

These measures can move differently without contradicting one another. More firms might accept orders online without the same increase in completed sales. A payment method tells us how a purchase was settled, not where the buyer and seller were. These are illustrations of what the indicators measure, not reported findings about particular countries.

The largest number in October's announcement belongs to another series altogether. Gordon Kalema, the EARDIP project manager, said intra-EAC trade had risen from $1.6 billion in 2005 to $19.65 billion in 2025. Those are his cited figures for trade within the region as a whole. They are not a count of online sales. Using them as evidence of e-commerce growth would erase precisely the distinctions the strategy proposes to measure.

Getting those distinctions right takes more than choosing better column headings. Age, gender and income breakdowns require sources that collect those characteristics. Business-size comparisons need classifications that can be matched across countries. Cross-border e-commerce needs an explicit rule for locating buyer and seller and identifying the transaction. Where a substitute measure is used, it should be labelled as a proxy rather than presented as a direct observation.

A blank cell ought to have an explanation

The strategy's less glamorous pages set out how the numbers should travel. National statistical bureaux collect e-commerce and regional-trade statistics. National programme-management units gather indicators; focal points report national progress to the EAC programme-management unit. A regional engagement platform is intended to review progress quarterly.

That is an institutional design, not proof that every reporting link is already working. Yet it offers something useful: a way to ask who can explain a missing figure. Was a survey never conducted? Did the definitions fail to match? Has a return simply not arrived? A regional table cannot distinguish those possibilities unless it names the source and the reporting responsibility.

The national consultations can help with a different part of the job. Sellers, logistics companies, postal operators, payment providers and public agencies see different stages of a transaction. Their experience can expose costs or disputes that disappear inside an aggregate. The EAC's account of its earlier e-commerce assessment describes that cross-sector approach as part of the strategy's background.

Consultation can improve the question. It cannot supply a missing denominator or validate a survey merely by bringing people into the same room. What matters for the baseline is which recommendations changed the definitions or sources, and whether that change can be followed through the data.

What the meeting did not finish

The announcement also identifies consumer-protection harmonisation, online dispute resolution and public-private dialogue as priorities. It does not report that protections have all been harmonised or that a regional dispute-resolution service has begun operating. Likewise, EARDIP's wider digital-integration ambitions describe a programme's direction, not proof that every component has been delivered.

Preparation for the AfCFTA Protocol on Digital Trade is another item in the announcement. Discussing readiness does not establish entry into force or domestic implementation in every state. A meeting can move that work forward without completing it.

For the next statistical publication, a more modest achievement would be valuable. Put a definition, numerator, denominator, reference period and source beside each indicator. Show the countries covered and the observations missing. Separate counts from rates and estimates. Let the reader trace a regional total to its national components, and retain earlier versions when definitions change.

The EAC has reported a revised starting point. The next test is whether a reader can see how it changed. A number that distinguishes an online order from a cash payment at the door may sound small beside $19.65 billion. It is also much closer to answering the question the e-commerce strategy was written to ask.