AfCFTA could kickstart regional single window

The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement could be the perfect opportunity to establish a regional single window for African countries. According to Clifford Evans, customs liaison manager at Berry & Donaldson and a member of the South African Association of Freight Forwarders (Saaff) Western Cape executive, the single window concept is a growing trend around the world. “In order to cope with the demands of growing global trade and the challenges of organised crime, the international trend is to modernise customs systems to minimise their disruptive effect on legitimate trade and tourism as much as possible,” he said. Addressing the Exporters Club Western Cape (ECWC) in Cape Town, recently Evans said through the AfCFTA there was an opportunity to bring about more regional integration in the customs space. “A first step in this direction would be to establish a single window within South Africa linking all government agencies to the EDI system,” he said. “A
set of import/export documents would only be submitted once via EDI and the South African Revenue Service (Sars) would then distribute electronically to the government agencies such as National Regulator for Compulsory Specifications (NRCS), Port Health, Plant Inspector, Department of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Daff) etc. Units within Sars such as the Rapid Response Team and Customs Border Control Unit (CBCU) would also have to be linked, preventing manual interventions.” Whilst such a process would not be easy there were already cases in the world that had shown it was possible, said Evans. “Singapore established the world’s first national single window in 1989, bringing together more than 35 border agencies,” said Evans. “Today the system handles more than 30 000 declarations a day, processes 99% of permits in 10 minutes and receives all collections through interbank deductions. “Angola is going to launch its single electronic window system in 2021,” he concluded.