The Libreville city council has launched a digital system for collecting commercial taxes at the Mont-Bouët market, a key hub of Gabon’s informal economy. This initiative, described as a first at the municipal level, relies on mobile payment through electronic money operators active in Gabon. The stated objective is twofold: to secure local tax revenues and to offer traders a faster payment method than the manual collection previously used.

Mont-Bouët as a laboratory for gabonese digital taxation

The choice of the Mont-Bouët market is no coincidence. As the beating heart of commerce in Libreville, the site hosts several thousand sellers and handles daily financial volumes that the municipality struggled to capture comprehensively. Traditional collection by agents exposed the council to revenue losses, receipt disputes, and risks of embezzlement. The shift to mobile money aims precisely to reduce these blind spots by generating instant traceability for each transaction.

For municipal authorities, the stakes go beyond mere administrative modernisation. Local tax revenues remain a crucial lever for funding market maintenance, urban sanitation, and neighbourhood services. However, losses from informal payments chronically strain the budgets of central African cities. By digitising collection, Libreville aligns itself with a trend already proven in Abidjan, Dakar, and Kigali, where municipalities have linked their tax systems to electronic wallets.

A response to the fragility of municipal revenue collection

The deployment comes at a time when Gabon, amid the ongoing political transition, seeks to rebuild the credibility of its public administrations. Local taxation is a priority area because it determines the ability of councils to deliver tangible services to citizens. Mobile payment has the advantage of bypassing physical intermediaries that can cause budgetary leaks. At the same time, it provides traders with a verifiable digital receipt that can smooth their dealings with the administration.

Concretely, market sellers can now pay their daily or monthly taxes via their phones without going through a collection agent. The mechanism relies on the infrastructure already deployed by Gabonese telecom operators, who have made mobile money one of their main growth drivers. The penetration of electronic money in Gabon, driven notably by Airtel Money and Moov Money, provides fertile ground for this type of transition.

A real-world test for local budget sovereignty

However, the success of the system will depend on several factors. The buy-in of traders, some of whom remain attached to cash for cultural or practical reasons, will be the first indicator. The technical reliability of the payment chain, including network availability and readability of electronic receipts, will be closely watched. Furthermore, the city’s ability to integrate these flows into a genuinely consolidated public accounting system will determine the reform’s budgetary impact.

Beyond Mont-Bouët, the experiment could be extended to other markets in the capital and even to other municipalities in the country if the initial results prove promising. The trajectory is familiar: several African cities started with a pilot site before rolling out digital payment to all their non-tax revenues. For Libreville, this operation is a real-world test of its ability to combine digital transformation with fiscal discipline.

The project also fits into a regional logic. The Central African Economic and Monetary Community (CEMAC) has for several years encouraged the growth of electronic money to reduce dependence on cash and broaden the tax base. Libreville’s approach contributes, on its scale, to this agenda.