CEPICI — Côte d'Ivoire's One-Stop Shop for 24-Hour Business Registration

Before CEPICI's single-window reform, registering a company in Côte d'Ivoire meant separate, sequential visits to the Commercial Court registry, the tax administration, the National Social Security Fund (CNPS) and a notary — a process the World Bank documented as taking around 40 days in 2008.
CEPICI's Guichet Unique des Formalités d'Entreprises (GUFE) put all of these steps under one roof and one file. The World Bank's own account of the reform ('In Côte d'Ivoire, Every Story Counts') records a young entrepreneur registering her company, Archive Expert, in under 24 hours, and documents fee cuts on the Register of Companies (CFAF 50,000 to CFAF 15,000 for corporate bodies; CFAF 25,000 to CFAF 10,000 for individuals) alongside a fall in typical notary fees from CFAF 600,000–800,000.
The cumulative effect shows up in two independently tracked metrics: the World Bank's Doing Business 'Starting a Business' indicator ranked Côte d'Ivoire 44th globally by the 2015 report, up from 155th — and the number of newly registered businesses rose from 2,775 in 2013 to 14,812 in 2018, according to Ivorian business-press reporting.
The reform continues to be iterated: with African Development Bank support, CEPICI is digitising further under the GUDIP (One-Stop Shop for Private Investment Reporting) platform, and by mid-2026 was reporting an 83% reduction in online registration time compared with a year earlier, targeting a full 24-hour standard by end-2026 across all company types. UNCTAD-sourced FDI data cited in the US State Department's 2024 investment climate statement puts Côte d'Ivoire's FDI inflows at USD 1.75 billion in 2022, up 9.6% year-on-year.
Caution: the registration count and ranking gains reflect the formal ease of starting a business, not proof that CEPICI alone drove Côte d'Ivoire's broader investment climate — the reform ran alongside other IFC/World Bank-backed business-law changes, and most newly registered entities are small businesses rather than large FDI projects, so CEPICI's isolated causal contribution to investment volumes cannot be fully disentangled from the data available.

Read the full analysis: https://www.cepici.gouv.ci/