The WCO and its partners devote a significant portion of its human and financial resources to training and development activities, with the aim to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of Customs’ personnel, processes and structures. Nevertheless, it is often not clear whether the training and development activities made a difference or whether specific performance issues can be addressed through the training.

Given the high percentage of training activities in the WCO operating model and the considerable allocation of scarce resources for training, all WCO’s learning and development actors/stakeholders must regularly consider whether the training activities are resulting on the expected impacts. There is a need to understand which parts of a training programme are effective, which are not or are irrelevant, and need to see how training could be improved to help members staff transfer their new competencies from the classroom to the workplace.

Conscious about the importance of training impact and effectiveness, the EU-HS Africa Programme funded by the European Union engaged on a pilot project with Eswatini Revenue Authority (ERA) in the framework of classification capacity building activities. This pilot project is based on an overarching framework of evaluation to WCO training and development activities, and contains a range of tools, processes and guidelines to ensure proper evaluation at different levels from a result/impact-based approach.

Inspired by a comprehensive and standardized methodology for evaluating trainings using a systematic model of five levels of evaluation, the HS-Africa Programme has engaged with ERA on a series of actions with the support of WCO lead official to measure the effectiveness of training activities planned. It will focus on how and when actors involved in training can collectively contribute to the success of training and development evaluation and ultimately improve the quality and the benefits of training. The outcomes of this pilot initiative will contribute to enhancing the training delivery under the HS-Africa programme and will feed into the HS-Africa Train-The-Trainer programme to be launched in 2022.

The results of the pilot will be shared with WCO Members during CBC 13 next February 2022.  

For more information, please, contact capacity.building@wcoomd.org.