ECOWAS celebrated a milestone on May 19, 2025, at the Sèmè-Kraké boundary crossing between Nigeria and Benin with the introduction of the Interconnected System for the Management of Goods in Transit (SIGMAT). Director of the Customs and Taxation Union at the ECOWAS Commission, Salifou Tiemtoré, led this occasion and stressed the need of the system for regional integration and global trade engagement.
“An efficient transit system is essential to facilitating trade, easing cross-border movement, and integrating ECOWAS into the global economy,” Tiemtoré said. SIGMAT is an IT-based platform enabling electronic goods in transit data exchange. Reducing pointless inspections, foreseeing risks, and quickening customs clearance at destination sites speeds up cargo transit.
As of May 2025, nine ECOWAS Member States’ SIGMAT will be running, according to Tiemtoré. Still to install the system are only Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau. Particularly along the Abidjan-Lagos corridor—West Africa’s busiest trade route by volume—he termed the Benin-Nigeria deployment a huge step in regional development.
He thanked Nigeria’s Comptroller General of Customs and Benin Customs’ Director General for their dedication to trade facilitation. He also recognized the work of technical teams from both nations in helping to reach this milestone of interconnection.
Speaking at the event, Adidjatou Hassan Zanouvi, Director General of Benin Customs, lauded SIGMAT as an ambitious project with the ability to significantly improve cross-border trade efficiency. Among the advantages she emphasized were faster processing, tighter fraud prevention, better regulation of trade flows between Benin and Nigeria, and improved goods handling.
Expressing optimism that the technical specialists from both governments would find workable solutions to guarantee SIGMAT’s whole deployment, Zanouvi hoped. She further stated that she hopes the meeting will produce tangible actions that turn this interconnection into a working reality.
Mrs. Aïssata Yaméogo Koffi, who manages Rules of Origin and Community Processing at ECOWAS, also gave a technical presentation detailing SIGMAT’s implementation status and the particular measures done to link Benin and Nigeria.
Bashir Adewale Adeniyi, Comptroller General of Customs of Nigeria also praised the ECOWAS Commission and the German International Cooperation Agency (GIZ) for helping SIGMAT grow He highlighted the broader regional effects of the system, claiming that it would digitise and harmonise customs transit operations throughout ECOWAS, increase goods tracking, curb fraud and smuggling, and streamline processes all while assuring public revenue and supporting commerce.
Adeniyi described the launch as a “powerful demonstration of regional solidarity and institutional leadership,” then invited stakeholders to build on this momentum to transform West Africa’s trade routes into engines of stability and riches.
Launched in 2019, SIGMAT aspires to develop a unified customs IT system to simplify transit processing across ECOWAS boundaries. The system should boost local commerce, protect tax revenues, and improve public financial management by means of better data exchange and anti-fraud activities.
Fundamentally, SIGMAT is a pillar of ECOWAS’s wider initiatives to boost economic development via transparency and digitalization, simplify logistics, and encourage intra-African trade.
