Customs procedures will soon be conducted entirely online in Senegal.
This will provide a breath of fresh air for Senegalese importers and exporters.
Customs clearance will be fully digitised thanks to version 2 of the ORBUS single window, which is part of the customs administration modernisation project.
The announcement was made on Wednesday in Dakar by Abdourahmane Wade, Director of Customs Information Systems.
“The forthcoming completion of a totally dematerialised environment, with the implementation of the vast modernisation project of the Customs administration, will undoubtedly place our country in the world rankings in terms of trade facilitation” said Mr. Wade.
He was opening, on behalf of the Director General of Customs, the closing workshop and restitution of the achievements of the project “From Paperless Trade to Mobility” funded by the African Development Bank (AfDB).
It has been implemented since 2016 by GAINDE 2000.
The Director of Customs IT Systems said that international legal instruments such as the Revised Kyoto Convention (RKC) and the World Trade Organization (WTO) Agreement on Trade Facilitation (AFE) call for the full dematerialisation of customs procedures.
“The economic emergence promoted by the highest authorities makes this a requirement as well as a priority” said Abdourahmane Wade.
Returning to the “From Paperless Trade to Mobility” project, he stressed that it is in line with the long process of facilitating foreign trade formalities, driven by Senegalese Customs for more than three decades, including the commissioning of the first version of the computerized customs clearance system called GAINDE (Gestion automatisée des informations douanières et des échanges).
“To this important achievement was added the implementation of the ORBUS single window, which interconnects the various public and private administrations involved in import and export operations, to which it adds value, while at the same time firmly embedding them in the digital world, with the digitisation of procedures that has become essential in the search for performance,” he said.
According to the General Administrator of GAINDE 2000, Ibrahima Nour Eddine Diagne, the objective of the project is to ensure the availability and integrity of information in a paperless environment through tools such as mobility, SMS exchanges, control, verification and processing in offline mode.
“The main result expected by its initiators is to provide users with new modules, including mobility for remote viewing and control of ORBUS documents by competent control officers on the various corridors; ORBUS disconnected entry to cope with connection problems when saving files; ORBUS SMS alerts to introduce SMS notifications on the status of applications and services offered by ORBUS,” Diagne added.
Written by Edouard Touré
