Online administrative procedures for businesses in Africa: what progress?

Can administrative procedures be completed online for a business in Africa? Many entrepreneurs of the OHADA zone must wonder. As a reminder, OHADA is the Organization for the Harmonization of Business Law in Africa, which includes 17 member states, mainly from so-called French-speaking Africa (Benin, Burkina-Faso, Cameroon, Comoros, Congo, Côte d'Ivoire, Gabon, Guinea, Guinea Bissau, Equatorial Guinea, Mali, Niger, Senegal, Chad, Togo, CAR, DRC).

What is implied by online procedures? 

Business formalities are administrative procedures which are necessary to create a company, to modify an existing company (change of directors, head office, increase or decrease in share capital) or the the annual filing of accounts. 

What is the current organization? 

In OHADA countries, these formalities are completed with the Trade Register, which is organized as follows:

• the Trade and Personal Property Credit Register (RCCM), which is kept by the competent courts’ registries in each State;
• the National File, which centralizes the information recorded in each RCCM;
• the Regional File, kept at the Common Court of Justice and Arbitration, which centralizes the information contained in each National File.

In practice, it is the registry of the commercial court of each country that keeps records of the RCCM. The procedures are mainly done on site, using forms, which are completed, signed and handed to the clerk along with the supporting documents. Thus, the formalities not being digitized or being only partially digitized, they can prove to be time and energy consuming.

Why the digitization of formalities is key

The possibility of filling these procedures online would significantly ease the lives of economic players as it would be:

• Time saving:  not only for users, who would not have to go to the commercial court to fill their formalities, but also for the administration, which could collect and make available companies’ data much more easily;
• Paper saving, since users could fill out their forms directly online and provide supporting documents in the same way; and consequently limiting the problems of paper storage, since we know that when the formalities are done on paper, the piles accumulate very quickly;
• Accessibility to all, thanks to remote procedures, which would not require to be in the country of the company's headquarters. Entrepreneurs, who are very mobile in the current globalized context, would not necessarily need a local intermediary to carry out their formalities; on another note, the informal sector could more easily move to the formal sector if the procedures were simplified.

What are the current progress and development prospects? 

When it was enacted in 2011, the revised OHADA Uniform Act on general commercial law provided the conditions for thecomputerization of the RCCM, the national file and the regional file, and Book 5 of the Act is entirely devoted to this question. This book expressly provides that the three files can be kept in electronic form, and recognizes the validity of electronic documents and signatures. 

In addition, since 2017, initiatives to computerize the register have been reported in the press. Thus, an RCCM digitization project, financed by the World Bank, was deployed from 2017. The stated objective was to enable companies to obtain all the necessary documents in less than 24 hours. In this context, the Permanent Secretariat of OHADA in Libreville organized from November 5 to 16, 2018 two training courses on mastering the IT solution deployed by this organization. This solution has been gradually deployed in other OHADA countries. 

However, this software seems for the moment to be limited to an internal use by the administration, as there is to date no RCCM online portal enabling companies to carry out their formalities directly online. These initiatives tend to come more from investment promotion agencies, such as the ANPI in Gabon, which enables to create and manage a company online. In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Guichet Unique de Création d’Entreprise (GUCE) is a unique center for the rapid completion of business creation formalities. It brings together all the services involved in the process of creating a business, including the notarial office, the registry of registration at the RCCM as well as the tax administration, with the stated objectives of speed, transparency, efficiency and facilitation. For the time being, even if they are centralized, the procedures are not yet fully computerized.

En revanche, si on sort de l’Afrique dite francophone, on trouve des pays plus avancés, à l’instar du Ghana où le « Registrar General’s Department » permet aux entreprises d’effectuer l’intégralité de leurs démarches en ligne, de la constitution à la radiation, en passant par les modifications en cours de vie sociale.

What are the requirements for fully computerized formalities? 

Five prerequisites would be necessary to set up an online service: 

• computerization destinés au public ;
• a system for the secure transmission of official documents et la possibilité de vérifier leur authenticité en ligne ;
• a system for secure payment based on local habits (eg electronic money);
• - a secure electronic signature system, meeting the relevant legislative requirements where they exist;
• an interconnection between the different administrations (RCCM, taxes, etc.) for greater fluidity.

Given the entrepreneurial dynamism that is currently witnessed in Africa, the digitalization of formalities is a natural evolution of the business world that is already underway.