Brown Card Scheme is an insurance project. As such, it is a social device designed and introduced to facilitate and give financial guarantees to the movement of motorists and their vehicles across our sub-region.
The system is non-profit. For it to function easily, all components of the population are urged to perform a number of specific functions.
- Firstly, the insurers authorized to carry out motor insurance business must cooperate with their National Bureau and issue the Brown Card to their insured.
- Secondly, the national Bureau as the organ responsible for issuing the Card and handling claims arising from the use of this Card must do everything to remain prompt in carrying out its tasks ; this will instill credibility in the Scheme.
- Third, the police of the Member States must ensure that all motorists crossing the borders of their States are holders of a valid ECOWAS Brown Card. The system can not play the role it has defined until the ECOWAS Brown Card is considered a mandatory travel document.
- Fourthly, drivers of vehicles engaged in the interstate transport of people must be honest in taking care to include the ECOWAS Brown Card in their travel documents. One of the main goals of the system is to facilitate their business activities and to save them financial embarrassment in the event of an accident far from their territory of residence. Indeed, the time lost at the police stations and in the courts in such circumstances can only harm their commercial activities, the compulsory wearing of an ECOWAS Brown Card is also applicable to all other categories of motorists who could be called to leave their national territory.
Finally, government agencies responsible for insurance, trade, transport and economic development must unite to act as intermediaries between National Bureaux and government authorities.
Thus, they will have to give their full support to the National Bureaux in all the provisions aimed at improving the functioning of the System in their respective countries. In addition, it should be recalled that the system is in fact an undertaking of common interest between.