Dakar port
Reforming Senegal’s customs
By Peter Guest | Published: 31 May, 2010
A public-private partnership has vastly improved the customs clearing procedures at Dakar port
The port of Dakar in Senegal is one of Africa’s most important logistics hubs, serving major markets across the Economic and Monetary Union of West Africa. The port, which is expanding its container capacity as part of its ‘Port du Futur’ plan, developed in conjunction with Dubai Ports World, has ambitions to become even more central to the region’s economy.
However, the port, like others on the continent, was also a major bottleneck for goods entering and leaving its region. This was not simply due to infrastructure. Hold ups in customs pre-clearance meant that it could take 15 days for documents to be released. In 1997 the government formed a committee of public and private sector players, including the customs authorities, shipping agents and brokers, to come up with a solution to reduce the waiting times and streamline procedures.
“We made a trip all around the world to see how people are dealing with this difficulty, and we saw in Singapore a very good system. When we came back to Senegal, we didn’t buy the Singapore system, but we began to set up a team in order to build our own system,” explains Amadou Mbaye Diop, director of international relations at Gainde 2000, the public-private partnership that was the result of these deliberations. The company designed a so-called “single window” – a system which allows traders to submit all their required documentation through one point.
“What we see is that there is no big technical challenge in the single window. What is the most important is the organisational challenge,” Mr Diop says. Not least, this involved changing the culture amongst public officials.
“You know, in Africa, the public officers are powerful. They are not used to having pressure from users saying: ‘give me my documents, I need them’. So when you have the single window, they have to cooperate with businessmen,” he explains. “They have to be able to work to some performance standards. So for example, you have to be able to say, ‘I need you to be able to process the document in one hour. This is a kind of contract between you and the user.’ And you see now the users putting pressure on the public officers.”
To achieve this, Gainde 2000 worked to reduce the cost burden for public agencies, Mr Diop explains, as well as to incentivise officers. “We finance all the material in order for them to connect to the single window. We pay for the computer, we pay for the network, we pay for the internet connection, and we pay also incentives,” he says. Hitting targets is rewarded by a monthly incentive payment of 35,000 CFA – around $70.
In 2007, the Senegalese government and Gainde 2000 began working with the Investment Climate Facility for Africa to speed up the customs clearing procedure at the port. Between them, they have reduced the processing time for pre-customs declaration to 3-7 hours, down from two days when the project began. A second phase of the project, begun in 2009, aims to the operating hours of the port so that it is able to offer a round-the-clock service and to reduce the custom clearance process from 18 to nine days, which would bring the port to the same level as those in France or Spain. A third phase, announced in December 2009, intends to make the entire customs process paperless.
The reforms do appear to be having an effect. While Senegal is ranked 26th in Africa in the World Bank’s annual Doing Business report, it is second only to Mauritius in the “trade across borders” criteria.
