To most people, a One Stop Border Post (OSBP) at one of East Africa’s border crossing points is simply a building where papers are processed.  TradeMark Africa (TMA) has worked to establish and improve systems at 13 OSBPs across East Africa to ensure that they are much more.  To the frequent border users,these infrastructures are more than just brick and mortar. OSBPs represent safety, ease of doing business and time and cost savings. Truck drivers, importers and exporters, clearing and forwarding agents and cross-border traders are among the many people whose livelihoods are affected by border crossing processes. Unfortunately for them, border posts in Tanzania and other East African countries have traditionally lacked the efficiency to ease the burden on trade to the thousands of their users resulting in high transactional costs and delays. Part of the problem was infrastructural, the other human. The old border outposts lacked important facilities such as reliable power, internet, avenues for efficient information sharing among border authorities, and enough space for day-to-day activities. This resulted in a back log of clearance and hence congestion. Inspection sheds were too small and could only accommodate one or two trucks at a go with tens and in some cases, hundreds of others waiting in queue. Traders had to undertake multiple paperwork processes, physically moving from one office to the next, often many metres apart. In many cases, drivers endured weeks of clearance time, partly due to only daytime processing hours. Nowadays, several processes are undertaken on a 24-hour...

Abdul Mohamed is a small business owner based in Dar es Salaam Tanzania. He owns and drives his own truck, which he uses to export plastic chairs to neighbouring Burundi. On Tuesday 9 September 2014 Abdul leaves Dar es Salaam at 7.00 AM carrying almost 2,000 chairs bound for a retailer in Bujumbura, the capital city of Burundi. The following day at 1.00 PM after 30 hours on the road, Abdul arrives at the border post of Kobero, just inside Burundi territory. Abdul Mohamed has been exporting chairs to Burundi for the last three years, a five-day return journey covering nearly 2,400 Km. He has made good time on this journey and he expects to spend up to four hours at the border post before getting back behind the wheel and on the road. But it wasn’t always so. Just four months before, Abdul would have had to make the same journey with two border stops, the first at Kabanga on the Tanzanian side of the border, then at Kobero. The procedure was lengthy. Abdul would, through the services of a clearing agent, declare his goods to the customs officers who would make a physical inspection of his cargo. That could take up to 12 hours as he waited in line with the many other truck drivers who use the central corridor to carry goods inland from the port of Dar es Salaam. Then, having completed that procedure, Abdul would go through immigration procedures before finally being allowed into the...