Africa-Press – Gambia. The managing director of Arab-Gambian Islamic Bank (AGIB) together with senior officials of the bank, recently signed a memorandum of understanding on revenue collection with the Accountant General’s Department (AGD) through Commercial Banks Interface with the Payment Gateway Platform. The signing ceremony was held at the Accountant General’s Department at The Quadrangle in Banjul.
The MoU is meant to improve the efficiency and accessibility of revenue collection, particularly through the use of a new digital payment gateway. The gateway aims to digitise revenue collection, enabling real-time transaction processing and streamlining various government services. The partnership also aims to increase accountability and transparency in revenue management.
The AGD’s collaboration with AGIB is expected to further enhance greater efficiency in government revenue collection from ministries, departments and agencies, effective next week. Under the agreement, AGIB will receive payments and remit twice a week to the Central Bank of The Gambia.
According to the MoU, Customers can now walk to any AGIB branch across the country to pay for government services, including machine readable passports, business registrations, fishing licences, land fees, sale of assets, lease applications, development permits, quarrying royalties for gravel and sand, mining royalties and a host of other revenue lines.
Accountant General Agnes Macaulay said the signing of the MoU marked the beginning of a long-awaited journey. “We started this journey together, and we will end it together, and we pray that it will be the beginning of a collaboration that is very outstanding and fulfilling. We want to change the trajectory of this nation, whereby payments, cash handling, will be left with the competent people. As accountants, we don’t want to be handling the money. We want to leave it with the banks, with the fintech companies, whose core competence is in that…”
“We want to digitise the revenue collection to the point that we will be eliminating our cashiers and get the people or the population who want to access government services to pay for these services through commercial banks or through fintech companies or through their mobile apps. This is just the beginning. In another phase, we will allow people to use their mobile apps to make payments to access government services.”
AGIB MD, Isatou Jawara, said the partnership marks a significant milestone in their ongoing efforts to enhance transparency, efficiency and accountability in public revenue collections.
She thanked both teams, especially the IT departments of AGD and AGIB.
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