Benin’s national trade national trade facilitation strategy is optimistic that it will dismantle trade barriers as it enters new frontiers of partnerships with organisations such as TradeMark Africa (TMA). The country has already embarked on this path with the establishment of the National Trade Facilitation Committee, which was set up following an interministerial decree to facilitate the implementation of the trade facilitation agreement adopted by the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2013. 

Eustache Pomalégni, the committee’s focal point, unveiled a roadmap for the development of an action plan that will outline the main guidelines for simplifying procedures, transparency and predictability with the aim of facilitating trade. 

“We are in a very competitive environment that requires us to resize our ambitions, to make efforts in terms of simplifying procedures, restructuring infrastructure and implementing obligations for the sake of trade facilitation,” he noted. As a member of the WTO, Benin is obligated to rollout measures to ease trade processes, with these efforts receiving the support of development partners such as the World Bank and TradeMark Africa (TMA). 

TradeMark Africa (TMA) is a leading African Aid-for-Trade organisation, founded in 2010 with the mission to grow intra-African trade and increase Africa’s share in global trade, while helping make trade more pro-poor and environmentally sustainable. The organisation started its operations in Eastern Africa, and later expanded to Southern Africa, the Horn of Africa. It later expanded its operations in West Africa by opening the first office in Ghana in January 2023. Plans are underway to scale operations in more countries in West Africa, with Nigeria, Côte d’Ivoire and Benin among the countries earmarked for trade facilitation interventions jointly with TMA and its partners in the countries and the region.

Zephirin Pognon, Deputy Secretary General of the Ministry of Industry and Trade in Benin expressed his gratitude to the partner organizations for the support. “The concerns related to improving the trade position of the least developed countries in world trade constitute important issues of development and international economic stability,” he explained. He noted that the field of trade facilitation is broad, but concerns many aspects including regulatory and customs issues, and the mobility of goods and people. As such, noted his cognisance of the support of TradeMark Africa in addressing sone of the challenges related to trade with a view to making it a vector of sustainable and inclusive economic development, a guarantee of poverty reduction. “TMA will not fail to produce results in accordance with the resource optimisation framework,” he reassured.

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Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of TradeMark Africa.