The Southern African Development Community (SADC) region is an economic community comprised of 16 countries in Southern Africa with a goal to achieve development, peace, security, and economic growth. Developing the regional freight transport system is essential for accomplishing these objectives. This paper investigates the potential of short sea shipping (SSS) in an African context, highlighting policy initiatives related to SSS development and identifying barriers and enablers of SSS to support international trade in the SADC region. According to our findings, SSS has the theoretical potential to work in the SADC given the large geographic region, projected freight volumes, and customs and trade policies the SADC region is pursuing. Such a system would have three main roles: to offer unimodal freight transport between port cities, to offer the main leg of an intermodal route, and to offer feeder services to deep sea shipping in a hub-and-spoke cycle. However, freight transport in the SADC region has a number of shortfalls that need to be addressed—of note, port competitiveness, customs provisions, and policies for intra-regional trade require impetus. Additional work is required in terms of policy to support SSS. Furthermore, considering the importance of synergies, the role of policy makers in improving trust, and developing cooperation among transport chain members needs to be explored.

The Journal of Transport and Supply Chain Management (JTSCM) seeks to disseminate research results and to support high level learning, teaching and research in the areas of traffic and transportation (operations, policy, planning), customer service, warehousing, inventory management, procurement, packaging, materials handling, reverse logistics, demand forecasting, distribution communications and information technology.

Namibia has not been spared from the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, and as intervention the Namibian government has rolled out vaccination programmes. This study was conducted before the roll out of these vaccines to assess the preference for COVID-19 vaccinations. Stated preference studies provide information about social demand, access, willingness-to-pay and financing for future COVID-19 vaccination. A stated choice experiment (SCE) survey was administered to a sample of 506 participants from Namibia's general population between October 2020 and December 2020. Participants were asked to make a series of hypothetical choices and estimate their preference for different attributes of a vaccine. A latent class model was used to analyse the SCE data. The study also assessed anti-vaccination behaviour, past vaccination behaviour, impacts of COVID-19 on mental and physical health and Willingness-To-Pay (WTP) measures. The WTP measures were captured as out-of-pocket and further calculated using the marginal rate of substitution method in SCE. Data from 269 participants was included in the analysis. Vaccine side effects (40.065), population coverage (4.688), payment fee to receive vaccine immediately (3.733) were the top three influential attributes for vaccine preferences. Accordingly, increases in mild and severe side effects of vaccine options had negative impacts on utility; with an average WTP of N$728.26 to reduce serious side effects. The average WTP to receive a high-quality vaccine with 90% efficient was found to be N$233.11 (US$15.14). Across classes, there was a strong preference for vaccines with high effectiveness over longer durations of time. The results provide useful information for the Namibian government to improve the current strategies for vaccine rollout interventions.