| Access token | The OAuth 2.0 bearer token your system sends on every call. See Authentication. |
| Acknowledgement | Your statement to ITS that your system has processed an announced version. It advances your delivery cursor. See Receiving announcements. |
| AfCFTA | African Continental Free Trade Area. |
| Amendment | A correction to a declaration. It replaces the whole document and appends a signed version. |
| Announcement | A message from ITS telling a country that a declaration it is party to has a new version. It carries a pointer, never the document. |
| AU | African Union. |
| Client certificate | The X.509 certificate your system presents on every call to the gateway, over mutual TLS. |
| Client credentials | The OAuth 2.0 grant your system uses to get a token with its client ID and secret. |
| Content hash | The SHA-256 of a version's canonical content. It is the ETag on a read and the If-Match value on an amendment. |
| Corridor | The stamps on a declaration, in the order ITS received them. It is derived, never declared. |
| CTG | Customs Transit Guarantee: a platform that issues the financial guarantee covering a transit. |
| Declarant | The person or company that lodged the declaration. TD fields 33 to 35. |
| Digest | GET /etd/reconciliation/digest: the announcements sent to your country that you have not acknowledged. |
| Discharge | The act by which the destination country closes a transit at the declared office of destination. |
| ECTS | Electronic Cargo Tracking System: a platform that fits and tracks electronic seals. |
| Endorsement | A customs stamp on a declaration: departure, release, entry, exit or discharge. |
| Entitlement | Whether your organisation may act for a given country, as recorded by the Secretariat. Different from a permission. |
| eTD | Electronic Transit Declaration. |
| Gateway | The single entry point for calls from your system. It checks the connection and forwards calls to ITS. |
| Holder | The country that has the write turn on a declaration, derived from the stamps. |
| HS code | A Harmonized System commodity code. ITS accepts 6 to 12 digits and checks the first six. |
| Idempotency key | A value you send in the Idempotency-Key header so a retried act is recorded once. Required on every stamp, cancellation and acknowledgement. |
| Include | A section added to a declaration read with ?include=, such as corridor or versions. |
| Leaflet | One printed part of the Transit Document. Leaflet I carries fields 1 to 35, leaflet II fields 36 to 44. |
| mTLS | Mutual TLS: both sides of a connection present a certificate. |
| One-stop border post | A crossing where both administrations work in one facility, so an entry can be stamped before the neighbour's exit. |
| Permission | What kind of act your client may perform, such as etd:endorse. Different from an entitlement. |
| REC | Regional Economic Community. It can lodge and stamp for the member States that delegated submission to it. |
| Receiving endpoint | The base URL where ITS calls your systems, declared in the ITS portal's System integration workspace. |
| Release | The depart act: letting goods run inland in a country that holds them. |
| Sandbox | The environment for building and testing, with test data. |
| Secretariat | The AfCFTA Secretariat. It admits organisations, records who may submit for whom, and reads every declaration. It acts for nobody. |
| Serial number | The identifier of a declaration, such as KEMBATD26081138. ITS generates it. |
| State Party | A country that is party to the AfCFTA and takes part in the transit regime. |
| System integration workspace | The part of the ITS portal where your organisation gets credentials, registers certificates and declares its receiving endpoint. |
| TD | The AfCFTA Transit Document form, with 44 numbered fields in seven sections, A to G. |
| TIN | Taxpayer Identification Number. |
| Verification code | The unguessable code printed as a QR code on a Transit Document. See Verify and track. |
| Version | One immutable, signed state of a declaration. Every act appends one. |
| Write turn | The right to exit, amend the means of transport or otherwise write to a declaration, held by one country at a time. |