Fifteen officials from Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia and Zimbabwe have all benefited from a joint Master Trainers Programme (MTP) held by the World Customs Organization (WCO) and Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica).
According to the WCO, the MTP made a collective effort to build a pool of experts on customs valuation (CV) and to develop the regional CV training materials of the various customs administrations to be used by the relevant trainers for more sustainable capacity building in southern Africa.
“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 CV, improving the training skills and competence, and developing a regional training materials programme to be used by the trainers.”
In order to meet the various objectives, the nominated officials had been undergoing training since October last year, the WCO said.
“On April 26-30, they got together again virtually at the final 5th Working Group (WG5) with experts invited from the WCO and Japan Customs.
“In this WG5, the participants took responsibility to deliver four-day virtual CV training to test their training skills and expertise as well as the regional training materials they had developed. All 15 participants demonstrated their outstanding knowledge, expertise, and skills as CV trainers, and as a result have successfully received “Certificate of Achievement” recognition from the WCO.”
Both WCO and Jica welcomed the strong ownership and commitment clearly demonstrated by the participating countries during the MTP and reaffirmed their support for the continuous efforts of customs administrations in southern Africa to ensure sustainable capacity development.
