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Making Africa's customs more efficient
By Daniel Dickinson
BBC News, Dar es Salaam

A queue of container trucks battered by hundreds of thousands of kilometers on the unforgiving roads of East and Central Africa snakes out of the port of Dar es Salaam.

Amongst the rainbow of container colours are ones imported by the Sumaria Group, one of Tanzania's biggest and most successful companies.

Each month it imports up to 100 containers filled with a kaleidoscope of raw materials to supply the company's numerous activities; plastic granules from the Middle East and China to manufacture plastic products, pharmaceutical ingredients from China and India to produce drugs, and sugar from Swaziland to make soft drinks.

In the other direction, the company is exporting some 300 containers of cotton each year, as well as a cornucopia of its manufactured products; plastic kiosks, drinks medicines, and more.

If there is one man in Tanzania who should know about the pitfalls of importing and exporting it is Jayesh Shah, managing director of Sumaria Group, a company which has been in business for half a century.

"In the past, it was normal to wait for up to a month to clear goods out of the port of Dar es Salaam and this had a huge impact on our business," he says.

"It meant you had to keep large stocks of raw materials to keep production moving. In the worst situations, when cash flow became a problem, production had to stop and profits were badly affected."