Borderless seeks freer, faster trade in West Africa

This summer, the Trade Hub’s transport team and partners in several West African countries are hitting the road to introduce a new joint initiative to remove the region’s trade barriers.

Borderless, a partnership between USAID, the World Bank and two West African economic unions, ECOWAS and UEMOA, analyzes the many reasons West African cargo shipping is so slow and expensive and recommends solutions, including regional economic integration (on the books for years but still not widely practiced), deregulating the trucking industry, automating customs, using containers for all cargo, and fighting corruption. Freer, faster trade would increase business activity and lower the costs of imported staples, like rice, improving food security for millions of people.

Borderless features a recent Hub report, which zeroes in on the cost of moving imports and exports between Ghana's port city of Tema and Ouagadougou, the capital of neighboring Burkina Faso—about the same distance apart as Newark and Chicago. Yet moving cargo along the West African route costs seven times more than along the American route—even though U.S. truckers' salaries are 25 times higher—and takes anywhere from 13 to 22 days as opposed to five days in the U.S. Additional studies will consider costs on the corridors linking Ouagadougou to Abidjan, Bamako, and Lome.

To push forward regional integration under Borderless, the Trade Hub in June hosted a joint workshop in Ghana with ECOWAS representatives of Trade, Customs, Immigration, and Communications as well as Ghana Ministries of Trade, Transport, and Foreign Affairs, to discuss the preliminary findings of the ECOWAS Trade Liberalization Scheme Gap Analysis for Burkina Faso, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Nigeria, and Senegal. The workshop prioritized recommendations and developed a preliminary implementation strategy and tasks in collaboration with ECOWAS, the West African Monetary Institute (WAMI) and the other stakeholders.