The Federal Ministry of Industry, Trade and Investment (FMITI), in collaboration with the National Single Window (NSW) project and the Nigeria Export Processing Zones Authority (NEPZA), has begun engaging stakeholders on plans to integrate free trade zones into the NSW platform under the second phase of the rollout.

The move aims to reduce duplication in import and export documentation and bring free zone processes under a single digital platform.

The virtual sensitisation meeting brought together operators, government agencies and regulators in the special economic zone (SEZ) ecosystem.

The NSW is a Federal Government initiative designed to provide a single electronic platform through which traders and agents can submit trade documents, obtain permits and licences, and process shipments without having to deal separately with multiple regulatory agencies.

Speaking at the meeting, Director of Operations, National Single Window, Peter Ekunkoya, said the platform would not replace the existing systems of participating agencies but would provide a single access point to their processes while allowing them to retain their internal workflows.

He said the project’s objectives included simplifying trade processes, enabling single-document submission, improving transparency and shipment traceability, and reducing risks associated with manual document handling.

According to him, the long-term target is to reduce import clearance time from the current two to three weeks to within 24 hours, with an interim target of three to five days.

He added that export clearance was expected to take less than a day, supported by reduced physical cargo examination and greater use of risk-based assessment and post-clearance audits.

He said Nigeria’s trade clearance costs remained almost twice those of some other West African countries, adding that reducing the gap would help increase trade volumes and revenue for both the government and private sector.

He said phase one of the NSW, which went live on March 27 and focused on non-oil exports, had processed over 110,000 permits so far through 10,800 registered importers and agents.

Phase one covered licences, permits and certificates issued by the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control (NAFDAC), Nigeria Agricultural Quarantine Service (NAQS), Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) and National Environmental Standards and Regulations Enforcement Agency (NESREA). It also included submitting air cargo manifests integrated with the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS).

SON accounted for the largest volume of documents processed, with 78,957 documents valued at N9.02 billion.

NAFDAC followed with 34,815 documents valued at N2.20 billion, while NAQS processed 38 documents valued at N30 million and NESREA 311 documents valued at N10 million.

Customs-related transactions and documents processed by importers and freight forwarders were not assigned monetary values.

Air cargo processing also recorded agile participation, with 24 of 27 airlines onboarded and 2,139 manifests transmitted through the platform. He said they have processed about N11 billion in permit and licensing payments. At the same time, some participating agencies recorded up to a 40 per cent increase in compliance compared with the same period last year.

Ekunkoya said they have identified gaps in phase one that they will address before deploying phase two. He identified data migration problems, backlogs inherited during NAFDAC’s transition to the platform and the learning curve among users as some of the challenges encountered during implementation. He said the platform had not recorded any data breach and was being operated in line with the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation.

To keep trade moving, he said they have introduced a manual LPCO upload option on the B’Odogwu platform to support Form M and Pre-Arrival Assessment Report processing; a temporary SONCAP default option for traders requiring SON regulatory clearance; extended expired licences by two months and engaged the Nigerian Shippers’ Council to negotiate demurrage waivers for affected traders and agents. Operators, he noted, had complained that some traders were still being charged demurrage despite the intervention.

The existing approval backlog at NAFDAC was another constraint, creating a backlog of LPCO applications submitted through the NSW.

These experiences, he said, would shape Phase two, with greater emphasis on “change management, broader stakeholder engagement, enhanced training and digital training aids, stronger data governance and wider coverage of customs support centres.”

A major component of phase two will be integrating free trade zones into NSW, allowing import- and export-related permits for the zones to be processed electronically.

By September, the team plans stakeholder engagement with free trade zone operators.

“The Integration between the NEPZA OSS and the NSW will enable seamless exchange of Manifest, Bill of Lading, and other trade-related information, improving cargo visibility, strengthening data validation and reconciliation, and supporting more efficient movement of goods between Free Trade Zones and the Nigerian Customs Territory,” he said.

He added that a third phase, expected to run from early to mid-2027, would cover full front-end clearance processing, oil and gas licensing, Form M processing, a trade visualisation system, duty payments and artificial intelligence-driven risk analytics.

Ekunkoya said the project team held three technical sessions with NEPZA and met with the Minister of Industry, Trade and Investment to strengthen stakeholder engagement ahead of full deployment.