I’ve been sifting through ECOWAS documents for a while and having a hard time nailing down the duties and tax that would be charged if we were importing RACHELS and charging people a discounted price. For our first few that we brought over, we just had them in our suitcases and didn’t worry about anything. If we want to scale we’d just like to make sure there won’t be any problems.
Does anyone have good information or experience with this? We’ve got plans to deploy in several West African countries.
Hi George,
W/resp to scaling (and cost), are you familiar with VillageTelco’s approach? Essentially, they put the RACHEL content on a USB flash or SD drive up to 128GB and use an inexpensive mini-router, such as a ~$20 GL-iNet GL-M300N-V2, to allow student access to the library. So, the cost to allow access to about 30 students is roughly $45. And the footprint of the device (installed SD card assumed) is about 5cm X 5cm X 1cm (2"x2"x1").
Seeing that one of your tags is Ghana, I will safely assume you plan to import to Ghana. I’m not certain that ECOWAS regulates the import duties charged by each of the countries that make up the sub region. For example duties on European imported cars into Republic of Benin are so much less than in Nigeria that we Nigerians import into Benin and try to smuggle it across the border. Your best bet would be to check the website of the Ghana Customs. But I know that most educational import have zero duties and zero sales tax on them so you might need to explore that route