Benin signs off on a paperless administration push 📂🇧🇯

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Benin’s government has announced a sweeping reform to digitize its archives and administrative procedures. The move is backed by a circular signed on July 24, 2026, by Rodrigue S. Chaou, deputy minister for Budget and Civil Service, working alongside the ministry for Digital Transformation and Innovation. It builds on the country’s ongoing push for more efficient, interconnected digital public services.

Modernizing the state 🏛️

The reform aims to gradually phase out paper documents in favor of digital records, streamlining how public administrations operate and manage documentation.

The announcement comes roughly ten days after Chaou represented Benin at the 17th Pan-African Ministerial Forum of the African Training and Research Centre in Administration for Development (CAFRAD), held in Rabat, Morocco — a gathering focused on reforming and modernizing African public administrations.

Cutting costs, speeding up processes ⚙️

The digitization drive serves several goals at once. Chief among them: reducing spending on printing, storage, and the upkeep of physical records.

The reform is also meant to shorten processing times for administrative files and improve the overall efficiency of public services. Officials say it should lower the administration’s environmental footprint too, through reduced paper use.

For now, though, authorities haven’t specified a rollout timeline, nor which agencies will be prioritized. No estimate of expected savings has been made public either.

Another step in the digital shift 🌐

The reform fits into Benin’s broader digital transformation strategy. According to officials, the country is currently drafting a national roadmap for public digital infrastructure, designed to strengthen interoperability between administrative platforms. Archive digitization complements projects already underway to modernize public services and improve information-sharing across government.

Benin thus joins a still-limited group of African countries tackling the digitization of existing physical archives. Rwanda is among the states furthest along on this front, with its Digital Archive Rwanda initiative aiming to fully digitize national archives by 2030.

More targeted efforts have also been rolled out in Madagascar, the Central African Republic, the Gambia, and Mauritania, mostly focused on digitizing historical document collections. Cameroon is in the mix too: the country has been running its own archive digitization effort for the past few years, led by an interministerial working group on e-government.

So, do you think going paperless can actually make public services simpler and more efficient for citizens? Let us know in the comments.