On 30 September 2025, the Central Bank of West African States brought its interoperable instant payment platform into service. Since then, a bank, a mobile money operator and a microfinance institution anywhere in the WAEMU can send each other money in real time, day and night, seven days a week.
That same day, a fully compliant truck leaving Dakar for Bamako probably lost several hours at checkpoints, and its owner may still have been waiting for his bank's answer on a second vehicle. Money now moves at digital speed. The truck still moves at the speed of paper.
Payments have had their revolution
This is not a promise, it is already everyday practice. The BCEAO counted 248 million electronic money accounts in the WAEMU in 2024, up almost 19 % in a year. The value of transactions reached 119 % of the Union's GDP. Electronic money now carries most of the region's financial inclusion, which stands at 73.6 %.
For transport, the change is concrete. Paying a carrier, a driver or a diesel supplier no longer requires cash, and every payment leaves a trace. That is one reason we accept our file fees by Orange Money and Wave.
Credit is still a paper file
Banks in the Union are lending more than before: 21,831 billion FCFA of new loans in 2024, up almost 10 %, according to the BCEAO. Volume is not the problem. Method is.
In our experience, a truck loan is still judged against real estate collateral that most carriers do not own, against balance sheets nobody kept when everything was paid in cash, and it is decided in weeks. We worked out what that costs in our piece on financing a truck: it is not the interest rate that ruins a carrier, it is the delay and the months the truck is not earning.
The paradox is that the answer is already in the carrier's pocket. His mobile money receipts, his invoiced jobs, the GPS history of his trips tell a banker exactly what he wants to know: how much the truck earns, and how regularly. A loan that read those traces instead of asking for a land title could be decided in days.
At checkpoints, time is paid for twice
For years, the WAEMU's Observatory of Abnormal Practices has measured what a compliant truck loses on the main corridors. Its latest published figures, covering 2019, are harsh on the routes out of Dakar.
Across all the corridors it monitored, illicit payments averaged 71,081 FCFA per trip, up from 50,334 FCFA the year before. On the corridors leaving Dakar, they exceeded 100,000 FCFA. In time, Bamako to Dakar via Moussala cost 154 minutes of checks per trip, and via Diboli 147 minutes. Between Abidjan and Bamako, there were close to 24 checkpoints.
The same report shows this is not inevitable. On Cotonou to Niamey that year: under 10,000 FCFA, 17 minutes and fewer than three checkpoints per trip. When a country decides to cut checks, checks come down.
The problem is old. At the end of 2012, the Observatory already counted 32 checks outside the border against 5 legal checks at the border on Dakar to Bamako, and six hours of delay per trip for a truck whose papers were all in order.
At the border and at the counter
The World Bank measures countries' logistics performance every few years. In its 2023 index, Mali scores 2.6 out of 5 and shares 88th place out of 139 countries. Behind the score lie realities every shipper knows: documents checked several times by different services, bonded transit whose file must follow the truck, and a single missing document that is enough to hold an entire load.
Most of these blockages have nothing to do with the state of the road. They come down to paper. We listed the documents that most often stop a truck in our guide to the Senegal Mali border, and what a delay at a border post really means in your goods are not late, they are waiting at a border post.
Lost time means fewer trucks
These hours are talked about as a nuisance. In fact they are a question of capacity. A truck held six hours per trip loses half a day on every round trip. Across a whole fleet and a whole year, that is trips that never happen, and therefore trucks missing from a market already short of them.
Giving time back to trucks is the cheapest way to increase transport capacity. It needs no factory, no loan and no new road: only complete files, traceable payments and checks that are not repeated.
What we do
Every job we assign leaves with a file checked before loading: vehicle and driver documents, consignment note, transit papers. Payments go through Orange Money, Wave, card or bank transfer, and every assigned truck receives a tracking key. For the customer, that means visibility. For the carrier, it means a track record a banker can finally read.
Read next: too much freight, not enough trucks for our field report, and shipping to Mali under blockade for the current state of the corridor.
Sources: BCEAO, launch of the interoperable instant payment platform, 30 September 2025; BCEAO, annual report on digital financial services in the WAEMU, 2024 (accounts, transaction value, financial inclusion); BCEAO, report on banking conditions in the WAEMU in 2024 (new loans); WAEMU Observatory of Abnormal Practices, 2019 report presented in July 2021, and 22nd report covering the fourth quarter of 2012; World Bank, Logistics Performance Index 2023.