‘Entebbe Airport should join electronic single window system’

The Uganda Revenue Authority (URA) has appealed to TradeMark East Africa (TMEA) to support the enrolment of the Entebbe International Airport onto the Uganda Electronic Single Window (UESW) system to enhance trade facilitation.

URA commissioner general John Musinguzi Rujoki said while TMEA, with support from the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), has seen several government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) enrol onto UESW which has eased trade, two more projects — the Airport Management System and the E-commerce project — should be enrolled to facilitate trade through the airport and e-commerce, respectively.

“The Gulu Logistics Hub will soon be completed, but the Airport Management System is still manual and work is slow. This still delays our traders who come through the airport. We also need to work on the e-commerce project, which we hopewill now fully integrate the whole

business. For those two projects, we shall be knocking at your door (TMEA) for further support. It is in our plan that resources available, we shall continue the automation journey,” Musinguzi said.

He made the remarks during the launch of four new modules under UESW system at the Sheraton Kampala Hotel recently.

The four new modules are the standards certification for the Uganda National Bureau of Standards (UNBS), tax resolution management for URA, licensing module for the Uganda free zones authority, the certification module for the dairy development authority and agriculture ministry.

BENEFITS

Musinguzi said the new modules on UESW will ensure faster issuance of electronic permits and licences to exporters and importers.

“As international borders continue to open, initiatives, such as these are preparing us to position Uganda as a competitive industrial and trading partner in the global economy, which is a vital component in our economic development,” he said.

He added that since implementation, the system has curbed delays in clearance, with import clearance time reducing from 14 days on average to about four days, while exports take an average of two days.

“With the addition of these four modules, certificates will now all be shared electronically so that facilitation of trade will be much faster than what it has been,” he said.

The UESW project, which started in 2014 and expected to end by December this year, is funded by the Danish International Development Agency (DANIDA), through TMEA.

UESW leverages technology to allow traders submit all the required regulatory documents, including permits and customs declarations, to approving agencies electronically using a single access point.

Previously, agencies were working in silos, requiring traders to move with physical documents from one office to another to get the necessary trade certificates. This causes delays and also increased the cost of doing business.

TMEA Uganda acting country director Damali Ssali said UESW implementation has immensely contributed to safe trade by limiting interactions through automation of trade processes that were previously characterised by delays.

“During the total lockdown, everything stopped apart from trade and markets. If we did not have UESW at that time, I do not know what would have happened because our exports of coffee, dairy, timber and cotton would have stopped. But with UESW, traders were still able to clear their goods both imports and exports as long as their MDA was on the single window,” she said.

The head of mission, Danish Embassy in Uganda, Nicolaj A. Hejberg Petersen, said benefits of UESW include reduced time and cost of processing export and import documents to increase trade efficiency.