Southern Africa MTP successfully completed with the pool of 15 quality trainers on Customs Valuation

19 May 2021

Under the auspices of the WCO/JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) Joint Project, five (5) Southern African Customs administrations, Botswana, Malawi, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe, 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 organized under the MTP.  Those activities included the organization of Working Groups (WGs) for improving the expertise of participants on Customs Valuation, improving the training skills and competences and developing a regional training materials/program to be used by the trainers to which the fifteen (15) nominated officials from the five Customs administrations participated in since October 2018 to achieve the objective.  On 26-30 April 2021, they got together again virtually at its 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 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.

On the last day of the 5th Working Group (WG5) an official closing ceremony took place with the presence of Mr. Ricardo Trevino WCO Deputy Secretary-General and Mr. Hiroyuki Sawada JICA Deputy Director-General, and Group Director for Governance and Peacebuilding Department as well as Commissioners/Senior representatives from the 5 participating Customs administrations. All parties acknowledged the efforts made during the Master Trainer Programme in Southern Africa including the time of COVID-19 pandemic.The experts from the WCO, JICA, and Japan Customs congratulated the achievement made by the participants and expressed their strong expectation for the important role to be played by the MTs for the regional development through quality training.

Finally, both WCO and JICA welcomed the strong ownership and commitment clearly demonstrated by the participating countries during the MTP and reaffirmed their support and collaboration to the continuous efforts of Customs administrations in Southern Africa to ensure sustainable capacity development.

For more information please contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org.