ACI for air freight to Egypt

Advance Cargo Information has applied to sea freight into Egypt since October 2021. From 1 January 2026 it applies to air as well: every air consignment destined for Egypt, regardless of size or value, must have a valid ACID number registered in Nafeza before the goods are loaded onto the aircraft.

The practical difference between the two modes is time. A sea shipment gives days between booking and sailing in which to correct a filing. An air shipment often gives hours. The same process that felt routine on ocean freight becomes the binding constraint on an airport-to-airport movement.

The Egyptian importer registers the shipment on Nafeza and obtains the ACID number. The foreign exporter transmits the documents from the origin country through CargoX, which is the channel Nafeza accepts for documents raised outside Egypt. Once the filing is reviewed and accepted, the ACID number is issued to both sides as a provisional authorisation, and it is that number the carrier needs before it will load.

Nothing in this order is optional and nothing in it is retrospective. An ACID obtained after departure does not regularise a shipment that has already flown.

The filing is expected ahead of shipment rather than at the moment of departure — the working guidance is to have cargo data and documents in place well before the goods leave the origin country, and treating that as a same-day task is where air shipments come unstuck.

The commercial invoice must follow the structured template Nafeza requires rather than the exporter's own layout, and the goods description, HS classification and consignee details have to agree across the invoice, the air waybill and the filing. A shipment whose paperwork disagrees with itself is the most common avoidable rejection.

An air consignment without a valid ACID is not loaded. If it is somehow tendered without one, the shipment sits at destination unable to clear, accruing storage while the filing is reconstructed from the origin side — and reconstruction depends on an exporter in another time zone who has already considered the job finished.

This is why the filing belongs to the booking conversation rather than to the despatch conversation. The question is not whether the documents exist but whether the ACID exists, and the answer has to be yes before the cargo reaches the airline.

Our operations desk coordinates the filing sequence, checks that the invoice matches the template and that the classification and consignee data agree across the documents, and confirms the ACID exists before the shipment is tendered to the airline. Customs clearance inside Egypt is carried out by licensed Egyptian brokers we appoint and supervise; MIDTRANS does not hold its own customs licence in Egypt.

We do not file on behalf of the Egyptian importer where the registration is the importer's own to make. Where that is the case we say so at booking rather than discovering it at the airport.