Congo and the ‘Single Window'—History of an Innovation

In this article, the authors review the history of the Single Window innovation in the African continent, and how a technological opportunity quickly gained important national political support but ultimately failed to deliver its promises to improve the business environment.

Trade Digitization in the Heart of Africa

Digitalization in sub-Saharan Africa fostered inclusiveness through the creation of new opportunities. The requirements of Western African countries are limited to a port-centric Single Window solution, while the requirements for Eastern African countries are about trade facilitation enhancement solutions.

In the heart of central Africa, with the continent’s fourth largest population of around 90 million citizens, the Democratic Republic of Congo is also the largest country in sub-Saharan Africa. Congo shares its border with nine countries; Angola, Republic of Congo, Central African Republic, South Sudan, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, Tanzania and Zambia. It has only a 25-kilometer coastline; otherwise it is considered landlocked.

Due to this large area connecting the shores of the Atlantic from the west to the African Great Lakes from the east, Congo was in need of a national Single Window (guichet unique) that could create linkages between the different regulatory agencies and the logistics operators, including the ports. This duality of having a small coastline and being considered landlocked impacts the requirements of the country in terms of a single window.

Internet adoption remains extremely low in Congo, at only 17.6 %. The low internet access level is coupled with very low access to electricity—at around 19.1% of the population—thus creating a barrier to digitalization in the country. The low internet connectivity and access to electricity are mainly due to basic infrastructure challenges—although these are not the only challenges.

In this context, Congo is willing to maximize duty collection and to increase the tax base through digital solutions to improve productivity and attract foreign direct investment. The main objective of the country is to simplify administrative processes and increase their transparency.

Despite being one of the first countries in Africa to adopt a Single Window to digitalize trade and strengthen customs processes, Congo had to engage in a wider reform of its customs authority.

What is a Single Window?

To accommodate the large amounts of information exchanged between private companies and government institutions in cross-border trade, the Single Window concept was created to simplify and accelerate the information flows between the involved parties.

The Single Window is defined as a facility allowing lodging of a standardized set of data and documents at a one-stop shop to accomplish all import, export and transit related regulatory requirements. It can provide solutions for the payment of duties, taxes, and fees.

The Single Window brings important benefits to government and trade, covering optimized risk management, improved security, growth in duty collection, and better trader compliance. In addition, it allows informed interpretation and application of the rules besides optimized use of resources boosting competitiveness and productivity for the private sector.

A Single Window may be non-digital; however, the use of digital platforms will allow the submission of all information once, and bring facilitation enhancements for the business community and the government.

A Promising Beginning in Congo…

Back in 2013, the Congolese Ministry of Foreign Trade and the Ministry of Finance initiated a major reform for the national trade Single Window. The objective of the government was to improve the ease of doing business in the country through the facilitation, simplification and rationalization of international trade procedures, while maximizing duties and tax collection.

The aim of this reform was the simplification of the procedure by digitalizing the whole import export process including the logistics processes. The Single Window comprises three modules: the pre-clearance module, the clearance module, and the logistics module.

On Aug. 2, 2014, the government of Congo approved by decree the contract for the implementation of the integrated national Single Window, legalizing a contract that was awarded on Oct. 5, 2013. The contract was awarded as a a public-private partnership. The PPP model is common in trade facilitation projects. In this model, the contractor is remunerated through a transactional token fee.

This was followed with a decree instituting the integrated trade national Single Window in Congo on Oct. 14, 2015.

The special purpose vehicle, or legal entity that embodies the financial implementation of the PPP, was created on Jan. 14, 2016. The build–operate–transfer model was used, where the contractor implements and operates to facility for a period of time, then the government takes back control after the capacity building and knowledge transfer have been executed by the contractor. The Single Window was operational on Feb. 16, 2016.

All transport modes are covered by the Single Window, including sea, air, rail, road, waterways, and lakes. The geographic coverage of the Single Window encompasses the eight corridor entry points of Congo.

The Congolese Single Window is the largest in the world by geographic and functional coverage. The scope covers 14 logistics sites and 10 license, permits, certificates, and other issuing agencies. The platform is used by 8,000 users daily.

An interesting feature of the system is the payment module which centralizes all payment of fees, duties and taxes in one bill payable at the end of the import or export cycle at the different commercial banks. The payment module adds traceability and transparency to tax collection, thus facilitating the reconciliation process.

…With a Limited Contribution for Business

Tax evasion and illegal exemptions remain a major issue for the Congolese government. Between 2019 and 2020, none of the financial agencies in the country achieved its assigned aims.

From national to provincial level, the administration’s inefficiency is flagrant, especially in customs procedures, which do not comply with internationally recognized best practices, in addition to informal facilitation costs and administrative hurdles leading to higher port dwell time, thus hampering trade flows.

Although promoted in the constitution, equal opportunity does not exist in practice in Congo due to patronage networks and this is a blow to the needs of a digitalized administration, as defined in our previous article, “Digital Tools for Fiscal Governance in Africa.”

The World Bank Doing Business index ranks countries for their competitiveness on 10 indicators. A comparison of the performance and ranking of Congo, between 2015 and 2022 , shows that while the import time was reduced by 65% and the import cost reduced by 10%, the number of required documents for import did not substantially decrease between 2015 and 2020. On the other hand, the export cost was reduced by around 20% and the export time by more than 50%; however, the number of documents to export increased from seven to 10.

From a different perspective, the logistics performance index for Congo, which is a rating of the logistics performance of the country from 1 to 5, where 1 is low and 5 is high, improved from 1.88 in 2014, to 2.48 in 2018. This is an important improvement.

To conclude, the Single Window reform in Congo was able to achieve some long-term outcomes in the improvement of trade efficiency; however, this improvement was not enough compared to other countries’ performance, because the cross-border trade ranking of Congo deteriorated in the ranking from 181 over 190 countries in 2015, to 187 over 190 in 2020.

It is now clear that the Single Window itself will not cure all Congolese checkpoint border inefficiencies. It has, however, provided the first wave of digitalization that the country needed to onboard a larger administrative transformation that should encompass human resources.

In part two of this article, we will go on to discuss how implement new human resource management strategies and policies are needed in Africa in order to advance good practice. We highlight how technological improvements applied to tax and customs authorities must be accompanied by a strong transformation of the human resource function that supports higher professionalism and ethical conduct in customs and tax officers.

This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of Bloomberg Industry Group, Inc., the publisher of Bloomberg Law and Bloomberg Tax, or its owners.

Author Information

Anthony Assassa is an associate member of the Chartered Institute for Securities & Investment, with over 12 years’ Africa and Asia background (Cameroon, Comoros, Congo DRC, Laos) in reforms to mobilization and collection of tax and customs revenues. He attended the international specialization cycle in tax and customs administration of the École Nationale d’Administration, Paris.

Elie Sawaya led several governmental reforms in Asia and Africa and is a digital, private and public sector expert working for GIZ with more than 20 years of practice in public private dialogue, e-government, private sector development, port community systems, supply chain, international trade facilitation, electronic tax systems, risk management, customs, and cross border trade.

The authors may be contacted at: anthony.assassa@gmail.com; elie.y.sawaya@gmail.com