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National Awareness Workshops on ePing, WTO TBT, and SPS Agreements

Rwanda | Burundi | South Sudan
August 2026

There’s a specific situation that plagues exporters from East Africa and beyond. For many of them; technical barriers to trade (TBT) including Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) requirements can make exporting a complex venture. How does this play out? Agricultural exporters; for example, need to carefully monitor maximum residue limits for pesticides to ensure that their produce is not rejected at the border. Monitoring this constantly can be a hassle; and that’s where ePing comes in.

Jointly developed by the UN, the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the International Trade Centre (ITC), ePing is a free online alert system that tracks every new or updated SPS and TBT regulation notified by WTO member countries. Instead of manually monitoring dozens of regulatory bodies across export markets, ePing lets businesses filter by product or market and get notified the moment something relevant changes.

In August 2026; three national-level workshops were organized under the MARKUP II programme in Rwanda, Burundi and South Sudan to raise awareness among the public and private sector on the use of ePing. These sessions followed similar workshops already delivered in Tanzania, Uganda and Kenya under the Standards and Trade Development Facility (STDF) project.

Beyond simply introducing the tools, the workshops gave public and private sector participants a deeper understanding of their actual obligations under the SPS and TBT agreements; and a way to follow up on specific trade concerns as they arise.