On 19 May 2021, the World Customs Organization (WCO) announced that under the auspices of its and Japan International Cooperation Agency (JICA) Joint Project, five (5) Southern African Customs administrations, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, had participated in the “Master Trainers Programme (MTP)” and made collective efforts in building a pool of experts on customs valuation(CV) and in developing their regional Customs Valuation training materials to be used by those trainers for more sustainable capacity building in Southern Africa on this important core Customs topic.
In order to support the WCO East and Southern African (ESA) regional strategy on the development of a “regional pool of experts”, the MTP took a holistic approach to build more sustainable training capacity in the region through a series of progressive activities organised under the MTP. Those activities included the organisation of Working Groups (WGs) for improving the expertise of participants on Customs Valuation, improving the training skills and competence and developing a regional training materials/programme to be used by the trainers in which the fifteen (15) nominated officials from the five Customs administrations have participated since October 2018 to achieve the objective. On 26-30 April 2021, they got together again virtually at the final 5th Working Group (WG5) with the experts invited from the WCO and Japan Customs. In this WG5, the participants took responsibility to deliver 4-day virtual Customs Valuation training to test their training skills and expertise as well as the regional training materials they have developed. All 15 participants demonstrated their outstanding knowledge, expertise, and skills as Customs Valuation trainers and as a result, have successfully received “Certificate of Achievement” from the WCO.
Story by: Riaan de Lange