Director visiting the ROCB in the Asia Pacific region

March 2009

On March 5th, the Director of Capacity Building. Mr. Lars Karlsson, visited the Regional Office of Capacity Building (ROCB) for the WCO Asia Pacific region in Bangkok. Mr. Karlsson, met with the Director of the ROCB, Mr. Takshi Matsumoto and the other colleagues of the office to talk about the status of the region and also about practical matter as planning, follow-up and promotion of the WCO Capacity Building programes and activities. During the visit the Director also initiated a discussion on how to use the long and excellent experience of the ROCB in Asia Pacific for the further development of the regional infrastructure for Capacity Building also for the other WCO regions.

In a comment about the visit, Mr.Karlsson stated; “I have had the privilege of visiting the ROCB Asia Pacific in Bangkok on several occasions over the last years and it is always very interesting to meet with our experts in the region to exchange views on how to improve our processes and our common ability to support, coordinate and facilitate implementation, monitoring and evaluation. The ROCB in Bangkok was the first regional office of this kind in our organization and they have very valuable experience that we need to transfer to other parts of the regional infrastructure for capacity building. We are now considering different ways how to do so. We are certainly not going to do the mistake of trying to re-invent wheels that already exists, even though having said that there are also considerable differences between our regions which of cause is something to take into account also when developing the regional structure. At the end of the day it is our regions that own their regional structure and it is an important principle to continue to promote the vital ownership parameter that is a well known success criteria for all capacity building initiatives. I am convinced that the regionalization process will continue to be one of our main focuses for a long time and the WCO Secretariat will do our very best to support that necessary process to ensure implementation success in the future”.