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AfCFTA ITS is the Integrated Transit System of the African Continental Free Trade Area. It holds one signed, versioned copy of each electronic Transit Declaration (eTD) and records every customs act on it as the goods cross the continent.

These docs are for the technical teams who connect a national customs system, or a Regional Economic Community (REC) gateway, to ITS. ITS is system to system: your own system calls the ITS API from its own code. Your officers keep using your national screens.

The Glossary explains the terms these docs use.

Who calls ITS

Caller	What it does with ITS
State Party customs administration	Lodges declarations for its own country, stamps them at its own offices, and reads every declaration its country is party to.
Regional Economic Community (REC)	Lodges and stamps for the member States that have delegated submission to it. Reads the declarations of all its members.
AfCFTA Secretariat	Records who may submit for whom, admits organisations and oversees the system. Reads every declaration and acts for nobody.

Your identity comes from the credential ITS issued you, never from anything you send. There is no country field or header to set, and a country claim in a token changes nothing.

How a call reaches ITS

Every call from your system goes through the ITS gateway:

1. Your system gets an OAuth 2.0 access token with the client credentials grant.
2. It calls the gateway over mutual TLS, presenting its client certificate, with the token in the Authorization header.
3. The gateway checks the connection and forwards the call to ITS.
4. ITS works out which organisation the credential belongs to, checks what it may do and for which country, and answers.

Hostnames differ by environment. The Environments page lists the token URL and gateway base URL for Sandbox and Production. These docs never hard-code a host.

ITS also calls your systems. It announces changes to the declarations your country is party to, and it asks your guarantee and cargo tracking platforms for answers. Receiving announcements covers that direction.

Two environments

Environment	What you use it for
Sandbox	Building and testing your integration with test data. Real validation and real refusals.
Production	Real declarations, once your organisation is certified and the Secretariat has approved production access.

Each environment has its own client credential and its own client certificate. Never copy one environment's credentials, certificates or data into the other.

Your journey

Keys, certificates and receiving endpoints are issued in the ITS portal's System integration workspace once the Secretariat admits your organisation. Certification is observed, not claimed: ITS records four successful sandbox calls (a first authenticated call, a lodged declaration, a release and an exit) and certifies your organisation automatically when all four exist.

note

A step-by-step onboarding guide is coming. Until it is published, ask the AfCFTA Secretariat how to start admission.

Where to go next

1. Read Before you begin and get your details ready.
2. Read Authentication to get a token and make your first call.
3. Read Lifecycle and stamps to learn how a declaration moves.
4. Use the ITS API reference while you build.