When Satya Prasad, Senior Trade Specialist at the World Bank Group, addressed delegates at the IMO–World Bank Group Workshop on Maritime Single Window and Port Community Systems in Accra, he opened with a disarming observation: procuring software is the easy part. The harder work, he argued, is persuading port authorities, customs agencies, shipping lines and freight forwarders to agree on who owns data, which standards apply, and who governs a shared platform once it goes live. That distinction, between technological acquisition and institutional transformation, cuts to the heart of West Africa’s port digitalisation challenge and, by extension, its capacity to operationalise the African Continental Free Trade Area’s ambitions on the ground.
West African ports occupy a structurally critical position in the region’s trade architecture. The Port of Tema in Ghana, the Port of Abidjan in Côte d’Ivoire, and the Port of Dakar in Senegal collectively serve as primary gateways for landlocked Sahelian economies, handling goods that flow through ECOWAS corridors into Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and beyond. Yet the region’s maritime logistics performance remains well below its potential. According to the World Bank’s Logistics Performance Index, most West African economies score between 2.3 and 2.8 out of 6.0 on customs efficiency, a range that reflects persistent bottlenecks at the port-customs interface where digitalisation remains fragmented and interoperability is largely absent.
The problem Prasad diagnosed is not unfamiliarity with digital tools. Several West African ports have invested in standalone digital systems over the past decade, digitising individual processes such as vessel scheduling, cargo manifests or customs declarations. Ghana’s Integrated Customs Management System and Côte d’Ivoire’s SYDONIA platform represent meaningful steps in that direction. What remains missing is the connective tissue: the legal frameworks, data standards and inter-institutional agreements that would allow these systems to communicate with one another, with shipping lines, and with the broader logistics community that depends on port throughput for commercial viability.
A Maritime Single Window, as Prasad explained, provides a coordinated digital platform for processing information on a ship’s arrival, stay and departure, consolidating what are often dozens of separate administrative interactions into a single submission point. A Port Community System extends that logic further, enabling information exchange among the wider ecosystem of port actors, including terminal operators, freight forwarders, transport operators and regulatory agencies. Together, these systems can reduce dwell times, lower transaction costs and improve the predictability that investors and traders require. But their value is entirely contingent on the governance architecture that underpins them.
That governance architecture is precisely where West Africa’s institutional landscape presents its most acute constraints. Port authorities in the region operate under different legal mandates, with varying degrees of autonomy from transport ministries. Customs agencies, which control the flow of fiscal data, have historically guarded information as a sovereign resource rather than a shared operational asset. Shipping lines and terminal operators, many of them subsidiaries of global conglomerates such as APM Terminals or Bolloré Ports, bring their own proprietary systems and commercial incentives that do not automatically align with national or regional interoperability goals. Coordinating these actors requires not just technical standards but political will and enforceable regulatory frameworks.
ECOWAS has a direct institutional stake in resolving this coordination failure. The community’s Trade Liberalisation Scheme and its broader mandate to facilitate the free movement of goods across member states are operationally undermined when port systems cannot exchange information efficiently. A truck crossing from Ghana into Burkina Faso carries documentation processed through systems that may be entirely invisible to the receiving authority. The result is redundant inspections, manual data re-entry and delays that add cost at every border crossing. The AfCFTA’s Protocol on Trade in Goods similarly presupposes a baseline of customs interoperability that West Africa’s current port digitalisation landscape does not yet support.
Comparative experience from other regions offers instructive precedents. The Port of Singapore’s TradeNet system, operational since 1989, succeeded not because it was technologically superior but because the Singapore government mandated participation, standardised data formats and established a clear legal framework for information ownership. In Europe, the EU’s Maritime Single Window regulation, which came into force in 2025, required member states to align their national systems with a common data model, backed by binding legislation. West Africa lacks an equivalent regional instrument, and neither ECOWAS nor the African Union has yet produced a binding framework that would compel member states to adopt common port data standards.
Prasad’s call for private-sector participation reflects a recognition that public institutions alone cannot drive this transformation. Shipping lines process vessel calls across dozens of ports simultaneously and have a direct commercial interest in reducing port turnaround times. Terminal operators manage the physical interface between sea and land freight and generate data that is essential for supply chain visibility. Freight forwarders and transport operators, who represent the small and medium-sized enterprises that constitute the backbone of West African trade, stand to gain the most from reduced administrative friction. Structuring their participation through formal Port Community System governance models, where private actors hold seats on governing boards alongside public agencies, has proven effective in European and Asian contexts and warrants serious consideration in the West African setting.
For Ghana specifically, the Accra workshop carries particular institutional weight. Ghana’s ports handled approximately 17 million metric tonnes of cargo in 2023, making Tema one of the busiest container ports in sub-Saharan Africa. The Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority has signalled interest in upgrading its digital infrastructure, and the government’s broader digitalisation agenda under the Ghana Digital Economy Policy provides a policy hook for port-specific reform. The question is whether the Ministry of Finance, the Ghana Revenue Authority and the Ghana Ports and Harbours Authority can align their institutional incentives sufficiently to build a governance model that international partners and private operators can trust.
Investor confidence in West African port infrastructure depends materially on this question. Development finance institutions, including the International Finance Corporation and the African Development Bank, have signalled appetite for port modernisation investments across the region. But their risk models penalise regulatory opacity and institutional fragmentation. A port that can demonstrate clear data governance, transparent fee structures and interoperable systems with neighbouring ports presents a fundamentally different investment proposition than one that cannot. Regional integration, in this sense, is not merely a political aspiration but a commercial differentiator.
What Prasad’s analysis ultimately demands is that West African governments treat port digitalisation as a governance reform programme that happens to involve technology, rather than a technology procurement exercise that will eventually produce governance benefits. The sequencing matters. Legal frameworks establishing data ownership and liability must precede system deployment. Inter-agency coordination mechanisms must be formalised before data-sharing mandates can be enforced. ECOWAS and the AU’s Digital Transformation Strategy for Africa, adopted in 2020, provide normative scaffolding, but national implementation requires political decisions that no software vendor can substitute for. Digital transformation, as Prasad put it plainly, is achieved when institutions, processes, people and systems begin to work together differently. West Africa’s ports are not yet there. The architecture for getting there is a governance question first.
