In the framework of the WCO-WACAM Project, funded by the government of Sweden, the Customs Administration of Gabon benefited from a “training of trainers” (ToT) workshop from 11 to 15 September in Libreville. At this occasion, the WCO was able to pilot its new state-of-the-art competency-based “ToT” workshop material, which was developed under the WCO-WACAM Project.

The workshop enabled 23 participants, including 7 women, to enhance their capacities to develop competencies in their Administration and beyond. The workshop focused its attention on critical areas such as the training cycle, the adult learning cycle, the development of training material and the evaluation of training sessions on participants and organizational performance. The workshop, which is highly interactive, relies on a blended learning approach and gives the opportunity to apply their new competencies through group exercises, simulation exercises as well as role-plays.

The Secretary-General of the Ministry of Finance of Gabon and the Director-General of the Customs Administration of Gabon highlighted the importance of this workshop and stated that thanks to the WCO’s support, the Customs Administration of Gabon is now equipped to deliver new training in key areas such as Customs Valuation, Tariff, Passenger Control, Post-Clearance audit, Change Management among others.
The 23 participants will now be called upon by their Administration to develop and deliver the new Customs Training Programme for new recruits by the Spring of 2018.

Though this activity, the WCO-WACAM project successfully concluded its capacity-building support per se to Gabon in the area of Human Resource Management and will now return to Gabon in 2018 to evaluate the impact of this training of trainers on the participants and organization.

For more information about this activity in particular and the WCO-WACAM Project in general, please contact the WCO-Sweden Programme Director, Richard Chopra (Richard.chopra@wcoomd.org)