[PROJECT NAME] Smart Customs Scenario for China-Africa Economic and Trade Cooperation: China-Africa Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Cooperation Website
(https://www.chinaafricasps.org)
[PROJECT OVERVIEW] To address challenges such as asymmetries in cross-border trade rules, fragmented information, and limited access channels, this project was established to enhance China-Africa trade facilitation while mitigating the impact of non-tariff trade barriers. It leverages digital solutions to integrate key regulations, standards, and trade data between China and Africa, establishes a bilingual (Chinese-English) service system, and serves as a digital hub for trade information sharing, regulatory convergence, and risk coordination between both sides.
[PROJECT DETAILS] Under the framework of Smart Customs Initiative, the website integrates multi-source data with intelligent and visualized technologies. It is structured around four core modules: an Access Information Database, a Laws and Regulations Database, a Trade Statistics Database, and an SPS & TBT Notification Database. Leveraging geospatial visualization (Digital Earth), interactive dashboards, and low-bandwidth optimization, it has achieved positive results in digital supervision and trade facilitation for China-Africa trade.
1. China-Africa Trade Information Hub. The website aggregates 178,400 pieces of information on China-Africa economic and trade cooperation in real time, including 121,700 entries of trade statistics from China Customs. With geospatial and visual analytics, it provides near-real-time interactive maps and trend charts on trade volume, structure, and potential. It has also compiled the China-Africa Trade Index with the year 2000 as the base period, providing comprehensive trade insights for customs monitoring, trade facilitation assessments, and market planning for enterprises. The index has been published for three consecutive years.
2. Green Lane for China-Africa Agri-Food Trade. The website offers a bilingual (Chinese-English), one-stop market access service, enabling instant, precise queries by country, product category, product name, or manufacturer. This significantly improves the efficiency of information retrieval. Since its March 2025 upgrade, it has served nearly 10,000 enterprises and processed about 400,000 queries, shortening information retrieval time from days to under 3 seconds.
3. Dynamic Non-Tariff Barrier Tracking and Risk Alerts. Through system interoperability and automated data collection, the website updates 38,500 SPS and TBT notifications and more than 600 laws and regulations related to China-Africa trade. It captures dynamic risks such as epidemics, food safety incidents, and product quality issues. It offers tailored, near-real-time technical trade alerts to help importers and exporters minimize compliance risks and trade uncertainties.
※In June 2023, the website was officially launched by the General Administration of Customs of China (GACC) and African representatives at the inaugural China-Africa Sanitary and Phytosanitary (SPS) Cooperation Forum, and recognized as a key outcome at the Third China-Africa Economic and Trade Expo.
※In April 2024, it was included in the Global Development Project Repository by the China International Development Cooperation Agency (CIDCA).