Many overlanders talk of buying Brown Card insurance when travelling in West Africa. This insurance is often sold at borders and the agents selling it say it is valid in all the ECOWAS countries. That means it pretty much covers you from Mauritania to Nigeria.

I have bought it in the past but on speaking to real insurance agents, they tell me it is invalid. They tell me that the problem is that the Brown Card is not actually an insurance in its own right. It only extends the cover of an existing local policy to other ECOWAS countries. If you're familiar with the old European system it is the equivalent of a Green Card, you still need to have an insurance policy on your vehicle in your home country.

For a Brown Card to be valid, you would have to have valid insurance on your vehicle in an ECOWAS country, then the Brown Card would extend your cover to other ECOWAS countries.

Overlanders with vehicles which are not registered in an ECOWAS country are not likely to have a local insurance policy upon which Brown Card insurance could be added. A search of the official Brown Card insurance web sites seems to confirm this.

Also, Brown Cards must be typed, not hand written. As I understand it now, if you buy hand written Brown Card insurance at a border you are effectively buying a piece of paper which the police will accept as insurance because they don't know what they are looking at but in the event of an accident, when the insurance is checked, it will be found to be fake.

I'd like to know the experience of others with the Brown Card for overlanders.

You are correct. I lived in the Gambia and had a locally registered Nissan Patrol. In Banjul you go to a local insurance. Once they issue the insurance cover you ask for the ECOWAS brown card. Same system basically as the European Green Card. Of course insurance cover is basically useless.... Just to please the local police....

Neddy, thanks for clarifying. On my experience, overlanders (me included on my first two trips to West Africa) are mislead into buying the Brown Card and are told it is real insurance.