Benin’s government has just announced a reform aimed at rolling out the digitization of archives and administrative procedures nationwide. The measure stems from a circular dated Friday, July 24, signed by Rodrigue S. Chaou, the deputy minister in charge of Budget and Civil Service, working alongside the ministry overseeing digital transformation and innovation.
The text pursues three main goals, cutting the state’s running costs tied to printing, storing and preserving physical documents, shortening processing times for administrative files, and reducing the administration’s environmental footprint. This circular fits into a broader national roadmap for public digital infrastructure, which Benin has been pursuing to make its various administrative platforms interoperable with one another.
The announcement comes ten days after Rodrigue Chaou represented Benin at the 17th Pan-African Ministerial Forum of the African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development, held on July 14 in Rabat, Morocco, a gathering focused on reforming public administrations across the continent.
For now, Beninese authorities haven’t disclosed the expected savings, a precise rollout timeline, or which government departments will be affected first.
By tackling the digitization of its existing physical archives head on, rather than simply digitizing new procedures going forward, Benin joins a still fairly small group of countries on the continent. Few African nations have taken on this kind of large scale project so far.
Rwanda stands out as a reference point here, through its Digital Archive Rwanda initiative, which aims to fully digitize the country’s national archives by 2030. More targeted projects have also been carried out in Madagascar, the Central African Republic, Gambia and Mauritania, generally focused on historical document collections rather than the full range of everyday administrative procedures.