Most people shipping a container to Senegal or Mali for the first time have the same experience. The ocean freight quotation is clear and looks reasonable. Everything after the vessel arrives is a series of costs nobody mentioned.
This guide is for anyone sending goods to West Africa from abroad — a company equipping a subsidiary, an entrepreneur importing stock, a family building a house, a contractor moving plant. The mechanics are the same. Only the volume changes.
What you are actually paying for
The ocean freight is rarely more than half the delivered cost. The full list looks like this.
At origin: collection, export customs formalities, terminal handling at the load port, and stuffing if you are not loading a full container yourself.
On the water: ocean freight, bunker adjustment, and marine insurance. Insurance is optional in the sense that nobody forces you to buy it, and skipping it on a container of your own goods is a poor bet.
At destination — where the surprises are: terminal handling at Dakar or Abidjan, customs duty, import VAT at 18 %, the statistical fee, ECOWAS and UEMOA community levies, the clearing agent's fee, the container deposit, port storage once free days expire, container demurrage, and inland haulage.
If the goods continue inland to Bamako, Ouagadougou or Niamey: inter-state transit formalities, the border crossing, and eight hundred to fourteen hundred kilometres of road.
Duty and taxes on ordinary goods commonly add between a quarter and a half of the CIF value. That is not an anomaly; it is the tariff structure, and it applies to everyone.
Full container or groupage
A full container — 20' or 40' — is yours alone. It leaves when you are ready, it is cleared as one consignment, and you control the timing. Below roughly fifteen cubic metres it is usually poor value.
Groupage shares a container between several senders. It is cheaper for small volumes, and it has two consequences worth knowing: the container leaves when it is full, not when your goods arrive at the warehouse, and clearance is collective — if another sender's paperwork is wrong, the whole container waits, yours included.
For anything above fifteen or twenty cubic metres, a full container is generally cheaper and always more predictable.
Vehicles
Vehicle imports have their own rules, and they change.
Several countries in the region restrict the age of imported vehicles, and duty is assessed on an administrative valuation rather than on what you paid. A car bought cheaply at auction is not cleared cheaply.
You will need the original registration document, a bill of sale, and in most cases a de-registration certificate from the country of origin. A vehicle shipped without the original title is a vehicle that stays in the port.
Vehicles can travel roll-on roll-off or in a container. Container is more secure and allows personal effects to be loaded around the vehicle — but only if they are declared. Undeclared goods found during inspection convert a routine clearance into a penalty file.
What actually blocks containers
An incomplete or inconsistent packing list. Customs compare the list to the contents. "Household goods" as a description on a container of building materials will be inspected.
Undervaluation. Declaring less than the goods are worth to reduce the duty is the most common piece of bad advice given to first-time shippers. Customs administrations here are experienced with it. The result is a valuation dispute, an inspection, and daily storage while it is resolved.
Regulated products without certification. Electrical goods, construction materials, some foodstuffs and toys may require pre-shipment conformity verification, obtained before the container sails. Obtained afterwards, it costs several times more and the goods wait.
Free days running out. The free storage period at Dakar is short. Storage and demurrage then run daily, and they do not pause because a document is missing. A file prepared before the vessel berths is cleared in days; a file started on arrival is cleared in weeks.
If the destination is inland
For Mali, Burkina Faso or Niger, the port is not the destination — it is the halfway point.
The goods move under the ECOWAS transit regime, which requires the file to be opened correctly at the port of entry. A transit document that is wrong is discovered at the first serious checkpoint, and the truck stops there.
Choice of port matters. Dakar serves Mali well and Mauritania directly. Abidjan and Lomé are often shorter for Burkina Faso and Niger. The right routing depends on the final destination and on conditions at the time, not on which line quoted best that week.
What we do
We work on the destination side: clearance at Dakar and the other main ports of the region, duty advanced where needed, and delivery inland across Senegal, Mali, Mauritania, Guinea, Burkina Faso, Côte d'Ivoire, Gambia, Togo and Benin.
Before you ship, we can tell you the tariff classification and duty band that will apply, which conformity certificates your goods need at origin, and what your packing list must say. That review prevents most blocked containers and costs nothing next to two weeks of demurrage.
We work on commercial and project consignments and on full containers. For very small shipments and individual parcels, a specialised consolidator will serve you better than we will, and we would rather say so than take a file we are not the right party for.
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