Proliferation of NTBs reporting and solving systems in Africa: opportunity or curse?

Although they have gained great popularity under the new Trump administration, tariffs are not the only measures a country can use to restrict imports. A wide range of tools can be used for protectionist purposes, ranging from import quotas, import licenses, discriminatory taxes or excessive documentation requirements on imports, complex or discriminatory rules of origin, or extensive use of trade enforcement measures, such as anti-dumping.

Generally referred to as “Non-Tariff Barriers” (NTBs) these measures are generally defined as restrictions that make importation or exportation of products particularly difficult and/or costly. Differently from Non-Tariff Measures (NTMs), which are legitimate trade policy instruments used to protect and preserve public interests, such as the environment, consumer safety and public health, NTBs are adopted with the sole purpose of restricting trade or with a primarily protectionist aim. However, the line between an NTM and a NTB is very thin. An NTM can easily turn into a NTB - despite adopted to protect public interests - when it is disproportionate (more trade-restrictive than necessary to achieve the legitimate policy goal), discriminatory (applied unfairly against foreign products compared to domestic ones) or opaque (lacking transparency in their implementation).

With tariff liberalisation largely achieved also in Africa, the elimination of NTBs remains a huge challenge for the Continent, since such barriers significantly contribute to the high cost of doing business in African nations, inhibiting regional and continental trade. This is why some African nations and Regional Economic Communities (RECs) have developed Non-Tariff Barriers (NTBs) monitoring mechanisms that offer to African economic operators the possibility to report such barriers for rapid elimination.

In the East African Community (EAC), National Monitoring Committees on Non-Tariff Barriers to Trade (NMC) have been created in almost all EAC countries to enhance the smooth movement of goods and services and reduce import and export time (only Somalia has not established such a body, although there are plans to operationalize it by the end of 2025). NMCs have the responsibility of identifying, monitoring and facilitating the elimination of NTBs by using web and SMS platforms where economic operators can report NTBs.

The Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the East African Community (EAC) and the Southern African Development Community (SADC) have adopted a joint approach in NTB identification, by developing TradeBarriers.org, a common online platform for NTBs reporting, monitoring and elimination. In December 2023, the EAC Secretariat launched a mobile app that offers economic operators a one-stop solution for reporting NTBs to trade in the EAC, COMESA and SADC regions. Recently, also the African Union developed a similar mechanism at Continental level for identifying and removing NTBs to trade in Africa within the context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA), which is operational since 13 January 2020.

In West Africa, WAEMU (better know with its French acronym, UEMOA), developed in 2006 with the support of USAID an “Observatory of Abnormal Practices” (Observatoire des Pratiques Anormales), to monitor harassement practices along the main West African corridors. The Observatory, suspended in 2017, used to publish periodic reports describing the outcomes of the monitoring activity regarding these corridors. This instrument, however, was not a full-fledged NTBs-monitoring mechanism as it only collected data on the number of checkpoints, illicit payments made to the control authorities and delays caused by these practices. This is why in 2018, UEMOA adopted the Trade Obstacles Alert Mechanism (TOAM), a web platform developed by the International Trade Centre (ITC) which allows businesses and privates sector associations to lodge complaints referred to NTBs, trade obstacles, and other challenges they face in their export and import operations so that the competent authorities can take the necessary corrective measures. In 2022, also ECOWAS adopted the TOAM platform. In addition to the WAEMU and ECOWAS TOAM platforms, similar NTB reporting platforms have been developed at national level in each WAEMU and ECOWAS member countries, subsequently embraced by African countries in other regions of Africa. But these national TOAM platforms, with the exception of a few (such as Mauritius, whose platform received 65 NTB complaints), have been generally a fiasco, given the extremely low number of NTB complaints lodged. In Seychelles for instance, only one case was reported, while in Zambia no NTBs have been reported since the establishment of the platform.

Another trade barriers monitoring systems adopted in West Africa has been developed by Borderless alliance (covering at the moment only Ghana and Burkina Faso), while the Institute for the Sahel of the Permanent Interstate Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS) has developed since 2013 a mechanism for monitoring trade flows of certain agro-pastoral products (cereals, peas and livestock) along the main corridors in the Sahel region and West Africa, which includes a database of road harassment practices in the movement of such products that are documented in periodic reports. Such barriers are summarised in periodic bulletins published by CILSS and describing levels of intra-regional trade in agricultural and livestock products in the Sahel and West Africa.

In summary, there is undoubtely a clear trend towards the proliferation of reporting and resolution systems for NTBs in Africa. In addition to the mechanisms established by several RECs, and the continental platform developed by the African Union under the AfCFTA, many African States have created their own NTB reporting platforms. However, the effectiveness and adoption of these systems has produced mixed results. In many cases the effectiveness of these tools has been undermined by a low awareness among economic operators. Despite efforts in establishing NTB reporting platforms demonstrate a growing commitment in Africa to addressing NTBs – considered one of the main restrictions to inter-African trade - there is a need to reduce their number, avoiding further proliferation. Efforts by African governments should focus on sensitizing traders to use existing platforms at the continental and regional levels, rather than creating new platforms at the national or sub-regional levels that may disorient traders, causing confusion on which platform to use. This is crucial to fully realize the potential of regional and continental integration, an ancient and deeply rooted aspiration whose origins date back to the 19th century, with the seeds of Pan-Africanism and the idea of ​​a united and self-determined continent, in response to slavery and colonialism.