The African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) Secretariat has signed a 20-year concession agreement with Nigerian firm Bergmans Security Consultants and Supplies Limited to build a continent-wide digital customs platform, targeting one of the most persistent structural barriers to intra-African trade.
Under the public-private partnership, Bergmans is expected to invest an estimated $3.1 billion in digital and physical customs infrastructure across AfCFTA member states.
The platform is designed to harmonise customs procedures, improve trade corridors, and facilitate the movement of goods across borders — addressing a fragmentation problem that has long forced traders to navigate incompatible national systems.
AfCFTA Secretary-General, Wamkele Mene, said the secretariat drew on Nigeria’s customs modernisation experience in shaping the project, citing the country’s use of digital systems in customs operations and revenue administration as a reference model.
The lack of interoperability between African customs administrations has been identified as a concrete constraint on AfCFTA implementation.
While a number of countries have introduced digital customs platforms and one-stop border posts — facilities that consolidate border checks from multiple agencies into a single crossing point — systems that cannot communicate with one another leave traders subject to separate procedures and repeated data submissions at each frontier.
The proposed AfCFTA Customs Modernisation Project will focus on enabling customs authorities operating on different technology platforms to exchange information electronically.
Technical components include non-intrusive inspection technology, integrated data centres, multilingual customs portals, coordinated border management, modern transit systems, risk management tools, and data analytics capacity.
Bergmans said the platform is expected to be deployed initially in at least six African countries before expanding more widely across the continent. No deployment timeline or named pilot countries were provided at the time of signing.
Once operational, the system is intended to reduce cargo clearance times, improve transparency, strengthen revenue collection, and ease the movement of goods across member states — outcomes that sit at the centre of the AfCFTA’s broader trade liberalisation agenda.
The agreement arrives as the AfCFTA — the world’s largest free trade area by number of participating countries — shifts from framework-setting towards the practical infrastructure required to make cross-border commerce function at scale.
Digital customs interoperability is widely regarded as a central component of that transition, particularly where national administrations continue to operate separate platforms and procedures with no mechanism for data exchange.
