Programme dossier
Led by INTERPOL.
WAPIS: West African Police Information System, and its treaty basis
A police records system for West Africa, on the premise that information which cannot be retrieved is information nobody has.
What it addresses
The official statement of the problem is geographic before it is technical: most of the sixteen countries of West Africa sit on the Atlantic, which makes the region attractive as a transit hub between Africa, Europe and the Americas. What a transit hub needs least is police information locked in the station that recorded it. Before a shared system exists, a name checked in one country returns nothing about the same person in the next, and a route that crosses six jurisdictions is investigated six times from scratch. WAPIS addresses the records layer rather than the enforcement layer.
How it works
It ran from 2017 to 2023 with a budget of EUR 28 million funded by the European Union, and it covers the ECOWAS member states together with Mauritania. The system gives national authorities an electronic police information system in which files can be created, managed and shared, and it operates on three levels — national, regional and global — so that a record entered locally can be reached by a neighbouring service and, where appropriate, checked against international police data. The design choice that matters is that the national level comes first: a regional system built on nothing has nothing to share.
Where it applies
WAPIS addresses one corridor described on the drug routes page: The West African corridor. The jurisdictions on each are listed there, and every one of them has a record setting out its treaty position, its confirmed national instruments and its current monitoring status.
That combination is what determines whether a programme of this kind can operate in a given place. Capacity-building assumes there is a legal power to build capacity around: an interdiction technique needs a statutory basis, a joint investigation needs a mutual legal assistance route, and a trace needs a record-keeping obligation. Where those are absent the constraint is legislative rather than operational.
Jurisdictions on those corridors — 12
Brazil · Cabo Verde · Colombia · Gambia · Ghana · Guinea · Guinea Bissau · Liberia · Nigeria · Senegal · Sierra Leone · Venezuela
This is the reach of the corridors WAPIS addresses, not a list of participating states: participation is asserted by the inherited index and confirmed by no official source, so it is not published. What can be stated is which jurisdictions sit on the routes in question, and what the record shows about each. Of the 12, 1 carry no national instrument confirmed against a citable register — Liberia — which is precisely the condition in which operational assistance runs ahead of the legal basis for using it.
Treaty basis
In substance the work operationalises the UNTOC provisions on law-enforcement cooperation and information exchange, which oblige parties to cooperate but do not supply the infrastructure that makes cooperation practical. The distinction matters: a programme of this kind creates no legal powers of its own. It builds the capacity of states to use powers they already hold under instruments they have ratified, which is why a jurisdiction that is not party to the relevant instrument gains less from participation than one that is. What each instrument obliges is set out on the conventions reference.
Questions
What was WAPIS?
West African Police Information System, led by INTERPOL. A police records system for West Africa, on the premise that information which cannot be retrieved is information nobody has. The description on this page is drawn from INTERPOL, which documents it.
What problem was WAPIS designed to address?
The official statement of the problem is geographic before it is technical: most of the sixteen countries of West Africa sit on the Atlantic, which makes the region attractive as a transit hub between Africa, Europe and the Americas. What a transit hub needs least is police information locked in the station that recorded it. Before a shared system exists, a name checked in one country returns nothing about the same person in the next, and a route that crosses six jurisdictions is investigated six times from scratch. WAPIS addresses the records layer rather than the enforcement layer.
Which trafficking corridors does WAPIS relate to?
The West African corridor. Those corridors and the jurisdictions on them are set out on the drug routes page.
What is the treaty basis for this kind of work?
In substance, the UNTOC provisions on law-enforcement cooperation and information exchange, which oblige parties to cooperate but do not supply the infrastructure that makes cooperation practical. A programme of this kind does not create legal powers; it builds the capacity to use powers a state already has under instruments it has ratified, which is why the ratification position on each jurisdiction record matters to what such a programme can achieve there.
Is WAPIS still running?
This index does not assert a current operational state for any programme in it. Funding cycles turn over faster than the pages describing them, and a dossier that claimed a programme was active would be making a claim it could not keep current. INTERPOL is the place to check, and it is linked from the sources at the foot of this page.
Where does WAPIS apply?
To the 12 jurisdictions on the corridors it addresses, each of which has a record here. 1 of them carry no national instrument confirmed against an official register, which is where capacity-building meets a documentation gap: a joint unit can be established in a jurisdiction whose statute this dataset cannot cite. Participant lists are not published here — the inherited archive asserts them and no official source confirms them, so the reach given is the corridor reach.
Sources
- INTERPOL — West African Police Information System . Checked 2026-07-30.