Digital Food Safety and Trade Services (DiFSATS) Limited focuses on leveraging digital technology to provide solutions to non-compliance with food safety, animal health and plant health related trade requirements to enhance market access for agri-food businesses. DiFSATS envisions to become a continental catalyzing Hub for the use of digital facilities and tools to improve the efficiency and outcomes of food safety, SPS and standardization in  Africa for increased trade compliance, market access and consumer safety.  This is achieved by continuously identifying the pain points; developing and supporting use of suitable digital innovations, facilities and tools to address challenges faced by the farmers, agri-food value chain actors, exporters and Importers, regulators and consumers across Africa regarding food safety, SPS measures and trade compliance. DiFSATS is working on digital solutions for enhancing certification ,traceability systems, risk assessment, process monitoring and control of temperature, pests and hygiene practices in food production and processing; SPS documentation, inspections at the border and approvals to facilitate official controls, as well as appropriate information exchange and sharing platforms to facilitate coordiation of stakeholders.

Our flagship digital platform expected to transform agri-food trade across Africa, especially under AfCFTA, is The Pan African SPS Compliance Cross-Border Trade Management System (PASC-TMS). It facilitaes compliance with food safety, animal and plant health regulations applied in cross border trade for agri-food products by enabling Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs), informal traders especially women and youth and smallholder farmers to streamline production, value chain and trading processes to ease compliance with requirements needed to access markets under the AfCFTA. The platform integrates four core functionalities to enhance SPS compliance in the agri-food value chain namely;
  1. Automating Simplified Trade Regime (STR) that streamlines Informal Small-Scale Cross-Border Trade (ISSCBT) through digital registration of traders, automatic complaince with threshold requirements of products and qualitites allowed under STR, enables e-certification and declarations, simplifies customs clearance documents, it helps in ensuring complaince to SPS and standards and monitor the contribution of ISSCBT to the economy
 

2. Automating inspection and clearance of food imports at points of entry by digitizing pre-border, on-border and post-border procedures to be followed in accessing import permits by food importers and onborder inpsection and certification processes undertaken on imports by official control authorities

3. Automating a system for early detection of plant and animal diseases outbreaks and food contamination; communication systems and alerts, and facilitating processes in managing and coordinating response mechanisms by different stakeholders to prevent trade rejections and distortions arising from such outbreaks 

  4. Automating mutual recognition of food safety certificates of compliance issued by Competent Authorities (CA) across Africa through standardizing common Appropriate Levels of Protection (ALOP) based on adapted international best practices, agreed upon conformity assessment procedures; and agreed upon format of certificate of compliance, as well as protecting the integrity and authenticity of the certificates using a centralized QR code repository for instant food safety certification verification.