Under the auspices of the WCO/JICA (Japan International Cooperation Agency) Joint Project, to support trade facilitation in Africa, a regional workshop for Master Trainers on Intelligence Analysis in East Africa was held in Mombasa, Kenya, from 2 to 6 October 2017. This is the last workshop in a series of 4 activities on Intelligence Analysis, jointly supported by JICA and the WCO, which aims at developing (i) a pool of well-experienced trainers and (ii) training materials to be used by those trainers. The “Master Trainers”, as they are known under the Project, have already been actively contributing to the capacity building of Customs administrations in East Africa. However, their contribution is expected to be further expanded to enhance “intelligence-driven risk management” and, for this purpose, they developed a training material on Post Seizure Analysis (PSA) which reflects the challenges and concerns faced by the Customs administrations in East Africa.
Twenty-five (25) Customs officials from Burundi, Kenya, Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda participated in this workshop and worked intensively to review the training material developed under this Master Trainer Programme with the advice of experts from the WCO and Japan Customs.All the participants exchanged their views, experiences, and ideas for the improvement of the training material and completed their work during the first half of the workshop.
The second part of the workshop included a 3-day training delivery sessions to which 20 Customs officials from Kenya Revenue Authority were invited to attend as trainees. All 25 Master Trainers took responsibility to act as trainers and facilitators during those sessions. The training material on PSA finalized during the first half of the workshop was immediately utilized in the training sessions and contributed significantly to improving the understanding of invited trainees.The positive outcome of this training demonstrated the great value of the materials, as well as the value of WCO/JICA collaboration on this matter. At the end of the workshop, the Master trainers also developed a delivery plan of training on Intelligence Analysis for their respective Administrations.
Throughout the 5-day workshop, the Master Trainers successfully demonstrated their ability and knowledge to act as trainers. Both WCO and JICA welcomed their strong ownership and commitment clearly demonstrated during the workshop which will improve their training delivery capacity through the Master Trainer Programme.
It is expected that the developed training materials will contribute further to the improvement of “intelligence-driven risk management” in East Africa.