ECOWAS’ interconnected System for the Management of Goods In Transit (SIGMAT) now operational in nine (9) Member States

A meeting of Directors General of Customs was held in Lomé, Togo, on 8th and 9th June 2023 on the Interconnected System for the Management of Goods in Transit (SIGMAT) between the Customs Administrations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo.

Representatives of ECOWAS, UNCTAD, the World Bank Group, GIZ and JICA also took part in the meeting. The opening ceremony was chaired by the Commissioner General of the Office Togolais des Recettes (OTR), Mr. Philippe Kokou B. TCHODIE. ECOWAS Commission was represented at this event by Salifou TIEMTORE, Director of Customs Union and Taxation.

This meeting of Directors General of Customs was preceded by the meeting of experts from the Customs Administrations of Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal and Togo, held from June 5th to 7th, 2023, also in Lomé.

On the sidelines of the experts’ meeting was a meeting organized by the ECOWAS Commission on the development of a roadmap for the deployment of SIGMAT in other ECOWAS Member States, which brought together the following Member States: the Gambia, Guinea Bissau, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone.

During their meeting, the Directors General of Customs of the nine (9) aforementioned Member States resolutely committed themselves to the full operationalization of SIGMAT, putting an end to the outdated manual management of goods transit operations along the ECOWAS trade corridors. It should be remembered that this program to interconnect customs IT systems is an initiative of the ECOWAS Commission, with the aim of  smoothing the flow of goods along the various road corridors in the regional , by eliminating multiple checkpoints and load breaks at State borders.

With the implementation of SIGMAT, the Customs Administrations of Member States will now work together to ensure that information on transit cargoes, once declared at an office of departure (the country of departure) and the itinerary specified, is shared simultaneously by electronic means with the customs offices of transit and the customs office of final destination of the goods (country of arrival), all along the corridor used.

To give concrete expression to their commitment, the Directors General of Customs signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) and agreed on a Framework Instruction for the use of this computer program. Under the terms of the said Memorandum of Understanding (article 19), any other ECOWAS Member State may become a party to the Memorandum by simply notifying the ECOWAS Commission.

At the end of their deliberations, the Directors General of Customs committed themselves to ensuring the implementation of SIGMAT, and made the following recommendations to the ECOWAS Commission

• Set up a single regional identification mechanism for economic operators;
• Finalize the SIGMAT procedures manual;
• Speed up implementation of the Community Transit Guarantee Mechanism Regulation;
• Propose, at the next meeting of the Steering Committee, a mechanism for taking charge of and ensuring the sustainability of SIGMAT implementation activities in Member States.

Finally, the Directors General of Customs agreed to entrust the Chairmanship of the Steering Committee to Togo until the next meeting of the Committee, and to hold the next meeting of the Steering Committee in Ghana in December 2023, subject to acceptance by the political authorities.

The above-mentioned meetings were held as part of the Trade Facilitation West Africa (TFWA) Programme, funded by the European Union, USAID, the Federal Republic of Germany and the Kingdom of the Netherlands.