MBABANE – Eswatini has reached a significant milestone in its efforts to strengthen tax administration and improve international cooperation.
The country has successfully completed the first phase of an internationally recognised review of its legal and regulatory framework for the exchange of tax information.
The achievement is contained in the newly-released Tax Transparency in Africa 2026: Africa Initiative Progress Report, jointly published by the African Tax Administration Forum (ATAF) and the Global Forum on Transparency and Exchange of Information for Tax Purposes.
The report tracks progress made by African countries during 2025 in implementing international tax transparency standards aimed at combating tax evasion, illicit financial flows and improving domestic resource mobilisation.
Eswatini is among 39 African countries participating in the Africa Initiative, a continental platform established in 2014 to help governments strengthen tax transparency systems and make greater use of information exchanged between tax authorities across borders.
According to the report, the initiative has become an important vehicle for enabling African countries to tackle offshore tax evasion while strengthening their own tax systems.
One of the report’s notable developments is that Burkina Faso, Eswatini and Madagascar successfully completed the first phase of the Global Forum’s Exchange of Information on Request (EOIR) peer review during 2025.
The review assessed the adequacy of each country’s legal and regulatory framework governing tax transparency and the exchange of information with foreign tax authorities.
The EOIR standard forms one of the cornerstones of international tax transparency.
It requires jurisdictions to ensure that legal ownership information, beneficial ownership information, accounting records and banking information are available, accessible to tax authorities and capable of being exchanged with partner jurisdictions when relevant to tax investigations.
The standard is built around three principal pillars: Ensuring information is available, ensuring tax authorities have legal powers to access it and ensuring there are international mechanisms allowing information to be exchanged efficiently between countries.
All members of the Global Forum commit themselves to implementing these standards and undergo peer reviews to assess compliance.
For Eswatini, completing the first phase signifies that its legislative and regulatory framework has progressed sufficiently to satisfy the legal assessment component of the international review process.
The report identifies Eswatini as one of the 39 members of the Africa Initiative, alongside countries, including South Africa, Botswana, Kenya, Rwanda, Mauritius, Nigeria, Uganda and Zambia.
The initiative was established specifically to assist African countries in using tax transparency and exchange of information as tools to combat illicit financial flows, reduce tax evasion and strengthen domestic resource mobilisation.
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