Transport & Logistics

West Africa faces two major challenges in the transportation of agricultural products by road across borders: road harassment (excessive checkpoints and stops, and demands for bribes) and inefficient logistical infrastructure and operations. The projects’ main activities in addressing these challenges are documenting road harassment, coaching truckers and traders in their rights and responsibilities, and working with value chain professional organizations to advocate for adherence to and enforcement of ECOWAS trade rules and regulations.

Within the USAID ATP value chains, monitoring of road harassment along the main onion/shallot, livestock/meat, and maize value chain transport corridors provides insightful data that complements the work carried out by USAID West Africa Trade Hub and the World Bank-financed Abidjan Lagos Corridor Organization (ALCO). The combined effort of these three projects provides a comprehensive picture of and an advocacy platform for road harassment in West Africa.  

Among our three value chain products, onion is the only one trucked across borders on a daily basis and thus has been documented most extensively. Ruminant livestock is transported on approximately a weekly basis; maize intra-regional trade is mostly seasonal. Thus, the data on onion provides a benchmark for comparison with livestock and maize.

Illegal payments are extracted when truckers and traders either don’t know or don’t follow the regulations – or when authorities choose to ignore it when they do. Illegal payments per 100 km are similar for onions and maize. Onion is more perishable than maize, but onion traders and truckers have been coached for a longer time to minimize bribe payments. Similar coaching has not yet been provided to maize transporters.

In contrast, ruminant livestock trade supports three times the bribe payments of either onion or maize because there’s considerable risk of traders losing revenue when animals either die or depreciate in value due to weight loss from lack of food and water during long delays.  So, they quickly pay higher bribes to mitigate that risk.

Through its documentation, education and coaching strategies, we have, however, reduced by 17% the total illegal payments along an 825-mile onion/shallot trade corridor from Kantchari, Niger at the Burkina Faso border to Accra, Ghana. Additionally, for the second annual “Operation Tabaski Ghana”, whereby some 2500 sheep were shipped in eight trucks 1,070 km from Fada N’Gourma, Burkina Faso to sell in Accra for the annual Muslim “Feast of Sacrifice”, illegal payments were reduced from approximately $480 per truck in 2009 to zero in 2010.