Report on the 49th WCO Fellowship Programme
The 49th French-speaking Fellowship Programme was launched in Brussels on Monday 23 February 2009. This Programme forms part of the work to develop the management capacities of Member administrations in support of Phase II of the Columbus Programme. It is designed to provide extremely promising young managers from Member administrations with training in supervisory and management techniques, so as to help them carry out reform and modernization within their respective administrations in a dynamic and sustainable manner. The Programme was recently crowned with further success, as a newly appointed Director General is a former Fellow. Mr. Mamadi Touré, an alumnus of the 39th Programme, was made Director General of Guinea Customs on 23 February 2009.
This latest Programme brings together 15 participants who were welcomed by the Secretary General of the WCO. This introduction served as a prelude to a series of conferences given by WCO experts, as well as to the eight-day Management Course.
The participants will then remain at WCO Headquarters until 20 March 2009 in order to prepare an in-depth study on a subject of their choice, under the supervision of a Secretariat tutor, and to make recommendations to their respective administrations for possible subsequent implementation. Lastly they will spend a fortnight in one of the Programme’s partner Administrations (Belgium, France, Japan and Switzerland) to round off their study trip.
The French-speaking Fellowship Programme is funded by the Customs administrations of France, Japan, Switzerland, and by the WCO.
The Fellows taking part in this 49th Programme were from Benin, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, the Dominican Republic, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea, Madagascar, Mali, Mauritius, Moldova, Salvador, Senegal and Tunisia.