Import Registry AfricaDashboard

◆ Method and sources

Every record here can be checked at its source.

Every record comes from a national regulator and names which one, with the date we read it. Everything here began as a public record, and we add nothing from private or confidential sources. What we do not publish is how we get to each register — that part is the work, and it is the reason this exists at all.
4
registers read
3,050
importers of record
742
carry European-made product
From register to lead51,440
registrations read51,440
across four national registers
still valid40,976
10,464 had already expired−10,464
distinct applicants8,234
−32,742
importers of record3,050
the rest manufacture locally−5,184
food and drink1,978
pharmacy and household set aside−1,072
carry European-made product742
−1,236

742 of 8,234 distinct applicants survive every cut — 9.0%.

◆ How it is built

Five steps, in order

  1. 01

    Find the register

    Most countries require a food or drink product to be registered before it may be sold, and that registration names the local company that took responsibility for it. Where the authority publishes the register, that is where we start.

  2. 02

    Read it at source

    No two authorities publish it the same way, and some of them publish it in a form that takes real work to read. We take whichever form the authority chose, and name that authority on every record we draw from it.

  3. 03

    Classify the products

    Every product is sorted into a category and every company carries the category it registers most in, so a dairy exporter can filter to dairy rather than read the whole register. Drinks are one category, not the only one — cereals, meat, oils and produce all sit in the same registers.

  4. 04

    Separate importers from producers

    Local manufacturers register products with the same authority, and appearing in the register does not make a company an importer. We separate the two. It is a judgement we make rather than a field the authority provides, and the limits below say so.

  5. 05

    Confirm the origin

    Each registration carries the country where the product was made. That is what turns a name into a lead: not a company that might buy from Europe, but one that has already cleared Spanish product through its own regulator.

A register is a filing cabinet, not a feed. What we do to it is the product.

Four registers · 51,440 registrations read · 10,464 expired and removed

◆ The limits

What this data cannot tell you

Stated plainly, because a buyer who discovers a limit for themselves stops trusting everything else.
Registration is not a shipment
A registration shows that a company took legal responsibility for putting a product on a market. It does not show volume, value, frequency, or whether that company imported anything last month. If you need shipment-level movements, this is not that dataset.
Domestic market only
Free-zone and transit traders re-export without entering the domestic market, so they never appear in a product register. Shipment data covers them; this does not.
Contact details exist for one register of four
Contact details are published for Ghana; the other three registers carry none. We say so per market rather than pricing the four as if they were the same product.
Expiry varies
Registrations lapse. Where the register carries an expiry date, lapsed registrations are removed before a company is counted; where it does not, currency is only as good as the retrieval date shown on each country page.
Four of fifty-four
Most African regulators do not publish. We would rather name the countries we hold than describe our reach as continental, so the gap is shown on the coverage page.
We can be wrong about who is an importer
Local manufacturers register products too, and separating them from importers is a judgement we make, not a field the authority provides. If we have classified a company wrongly, tell us and we will correct the record and note when we did.

◆ The fields

What a record contains

Published in full, so you can tell whether it holds what you need before you pay for anything.
company_name
the registrant — the importer of record
city
where the register states it
market
the country the registration is valid in
authority
the regulator that granted it
retrieved
the date we read that publication
registrations
live registrations held, expired ones removed
foreign_registrations
of those, made outside the market
european_registrations
of those, made in Europe
origins[]
each country of manufacture, with a count
top_category
the category the company registers most in
categories[]
the full category mix, with counts
products[]
registered product names
manufacturers[]
the makers named on the registrations
phone, mobile
where the authority publishes them
email, postal_address
where the authority publishes them

Contact fields are published by one of the four authorities. Where a register does not carry a field, we leave it empty rather than infer it.