The government is bringing overland freight into Nafeza for the first time, the hardest lane it has left to digitize

Egypt’s most analog freight lane is about to lose its paper. The Finance Ministry is surveying the road-freight companies that operate at land ports — a step toward registering them, regularizing their status, and linking them to Nafeza, the national single window for foreign trade, three government officials tell EnterpriseAM. The aim is to fold truck-borne cargo into the same electronic system that governs sea and air freight, letting customs track shipments and vet the data on them before they reach the border, the sources say.

What changes at the port: The plan brings in consolidated bills of lading for land freight and requires trucking companies to file a detailed declaration of what each truck is carrying. This is to allow customs to know the nature of goods in advance and prepare for inspection, the sources say.

The goal is to kill the paper. “The Finance Ministry’s aim in linking land-freight companies to Nafeza is to move gradually from paper procedures and in-person dealings to a digitized documentary cycle,” the sources tell us. The aim is to have shipment data as “part of an electronic database that can be reviewed, tracked, and tied to inspection and release.”

Where it lands first, and why: The changes will first target Red Sea ports including Nuweiba and Safaga, the sources say. Gulf tensions have driven more trucking traffic onto alternative export routes, including the land-sea trade route between Nuweiba and Jordan’s Aqaba, which continues into Saudi Arabia, the UAE, and Kuwait. Safaga is being expanded to absorb traffic growth and prevent backlogs, with digitized procedures and a Nafeza link expected to cut how long trucks wait for inspection and paperwork, the sources add.

IN CONTEXT- Egypt’s Red Sea ports are carrying a bigger share of the country’s Gulf trade as shippers increasingly use land-sea routes to move cargo into Saudi Arabia and beyond. Freight demand on the Safaga-Duba corridor had surged 25%-30% back in March above normal levels as shippers sought alternatives around Hormuz and Bab Al Mandab. Traffic on the Nuweiba-Aqaba route had climbed back in March too — up from the usual 60-70 trucks to as many as 100 refrigerated containers on busier days.

DATA POINT- Roads carried 90.7% of land freight in 2026, the Cabinet’s Information and Decision Support Center said in July, projecting road-freight volumes to grow 1.8% to reach 97.1 mn tons by 2030.

The move extends Egypt’s advance cargo information (ACI) system — pre-registration of shipment data before goods arrive — which became mandatory on sea freight in October 2021 and on air freight in January 2026.

The weakest link

The rules are built for structured operators — and most of the market isn’t structured. Around 90% of Egypt’s trucking fleet is individually owned, which “creates constraints in efficiency, compliance, and economies of scale,” Reliance Operations and Maintenance Services Managing Director Omar Ragheb tells EnterpriseAM. The structured firms are ready: “We have our FMS [fleet management system]. I think we can easily integrate,” Ragheb says. “If this is implemented, structured companies will certainly be more responsive and find it easier to enter the system. But at the end of the day, any new system faces resistance to change.”

The risk shows up at the gate. “Given that most trucks on the road are individually owned, that could create a massive backlog and congestion at the ports — that’s a real risk,” Ragheb says. That could produce the opposite of what the ministry might expect: rather than consolidating volume toward bigger, compliant players, it risks a chunk of the fleet falling out of step with the new system.

The deeper design problem is that the truck doesn’t hold the data. “A mandate that lands on the truck asks the weakest link to submit information it doesn’t have,” Trella co-founder and COO Ali El Atrash tells us. The importer and the clearance broker hold the cargo data, while the carrier “is the last party to see” it, he says. In Trella’s own ports business, “the single biggest source of delay isn’t driving, it’s documentation arriving late or wrong.”

Whether it speeds anything up hinges on one condition — the system has to answer back. “If pre-arrival submission tells the carrier what’s been accepted, what’s outstanding, and who has to act, it changes the dispatch decision,” El Atrash says. “If it doesn’t, it’s just earlier waiting.”

Starting at the Red Sea is the easy part. Sokhna and Safaga — and possibly Nuweiba, though it sees less traffic — are “highly organized ports managed by DP World or Abu Dhabi Ports, [so] deploying the system there will be much easier and faster,” Ragheb says, adding that this is a more structured environment than higher-traffic Alexandria and Port Said.

Data won’t shorten a lab test

The release-time gains are real. Average release at Alexandria fell from 16.1 days in 2021 to 8.6 in 2024 — a 46% drop — per the Customs Authority’s own time-release study. Investment Minister Mohamed Farid also said last month it was around 5.8 days nationally against a two-day target. Faster clearance saves USD mns paid to customs-yard and warehouse operators, lowers import costs and spending on demurrage and port fines, eases trade, and lifts collection efficiency, Customs Authority head Ahmad Amawi told us last year.

But the same study shows 74% of consignments were physically inspected, down from 93%. “Three in four containers still get opened,” El Atrash says. That is where advance data could make the next difference: rather than simply making every shipment’s paperwork arrive earlier, the information could be used to send inspectors toward higher-risk cargo and allow lower-risk loads to move through more quickly, he adds.

Some bottlenecks sit outside the data: Laboratory testing, inspection capacity, the number of agencies that can hold a shipment, and import inspections stopping at 6pm when trucks move at night can all keep cargo waiting even when its documents are already in the system, El Atrash says. For trucking, predictability matters more than the average: “A five-day clearance we can plan around is worth more to us than a three-day one we can't,” he tells us.

Even a cleared shipment still hits paper at the end. The sticking point for exporters comes after clearance, says Senior Export Operations Specialist at Martico Egypt Ahmed Elshuqairi. “The main thing that can still cause delays is the manual submission of the customs-clearance documents to the shipping line’s agency,” he says. “Sometimes the shipment is already cleared, but we still need to physically submit the documents to the agency,” which is hard when the port is congested or the agency only takes papers at set hours. “If this step could be done electronically, it would make things much easier and faster.”

The survey of trucking firms is the first step. Linking them to Nafeza will put the bills’ data into an electronic cycle customs can refer back to, with wider use of consolidated bills for the shipments they carry, the sources say. “The step won’t stop at digitizing a paper or a document — it aims to build an integrated data chain for the overland shipment, from the moment the bill of lading is drawn up until it enters the land port, is inspected, and released,” they say.

Read more on this story in our EnterpriseAM Logistics edition, out at 9am CLT.