The World Customs Organization (WCO) held its East South Africa regional workshop on “Coordinated Border Management with a special focus on One Stop Border Posts (OSBP) in Single Window Environments” for its 22 Members from July 23-27.
The workshop further enhanced the understanding of the role of OSBPs in a single window environment, of the respective features of the two, and of the interrelation between them, to facilitate the cross-border movement of goods and people in the ESA region. Participants had the opportunity to visit an example of best practice in the region, the Busia One Stop Border Post, which is on the border between Uganda and Kenya. The field trip experience and the experiences of members from the region were used as the basis for organizing several activities. These drew on case studies from ESA and other WCO regions and focused mainly on business process analysis and process re-engineering for the exchange of information between Customs, CBRAs and other stakeholders in a single window environment, and OSBPs.
The importance of international standards and instruments, such as the WCO Data Model and Revised Kyoto Convention, was also highlighted with regards to the semantic interoperability and co-orchestration of business processes in the interfaced and hybrid single window models, and on the more specific scale of OSBPs, with a view to achieving inter-agency cooperation.
