Article kindly provided by Ms. Riitta Passi, Project Manager, Nairobi
The 6th Steering Committee (SC) Meeting of the Finnish-funded WCO Project "Building Trade Capacity through Customs Modernization in the East and Southern Africa (ESA) Region" took place in Brussels, Belgium, on the 25th of June 2014 in the margins of the WCO Council sessions. Members of the Project SC are Malawi, South Africa, Kenya, Mauritius, Namibia, the Finnish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Finnish Customs and the WCO Secretariat.
The Project started in September 2011 and focuses on support in 5 key Project components in support of the WCO ESA Region: Leadership and Management Development, nCEN implementation and use, Coordinated Border Management (CBM), support to the ESA ROCB and country-specific support for Namibia.
The 6th SC Meeting welcomed the progress made so far in all Project components in the Region and highly appreciated the number of activities (15) carried out during the first 9 months of the 3rd project year. The SC especially endorsed the work done within Gender Equality and acknowledged the successful workshop on the WCO Gender Equality Organizational Assessment tool that took place in Lesotho in April 2014. The SC welcomed the progress achieved in implementing the nCEN (3 finalized and 13 in progress) and noted the several activities carried out in support of CBM and Single Window (SW): Top management and National Policy dialogues, Site visits, SW workshop and contracting a SW expert to assist the Mauritius Revenue Authority to finalize the implementation of SW.
The SC took also note on the financial report, approved the Project Work Plan for the coming months and recommended funding made available from the Project for a regional Donor Conference as a follow-up activity to the regional workshop on Resource Mobilization.
The SC welcomed the decision taken by Finland’s Ministry for Foreign Affairs on the no-cost extension of the Project until the end of March 2016, and again thanked the Ministry for this decision.
The next meeting of the SC will most probably take place in Malawi in January/February 2015.
The complete SC meeting resolutions can be found here.
For further information on the Project, please feel free to contact the Project Manager at the ROCB in Nairobi, Ms. Riitta Passi (riitta.passi@gmail.com), or the WCO Capacity Building Directorate in Brussels (capacity.building@wcoomd.org).