The WCO organized a specific training in project management with a specific focus on Monitoring and Evaluation, which took place from 3 to 11 December in Mombasa, Kenya, at the Regional Training Centre. At this occasion, the WCO had the opportunity to deliver its project management training package, which was developed under the WCO-WACAM Project. The training enabled 22 participants from the WCO ESA Regional Structures including 8 female participants and 14 male participants, to enhance their capacities in project management - to design, implement, monitor and evaluate modernization and reform projects within their administration and across the region.

The workshop focused on core project management issues, including the project cycle, problem definition, project governance, logic modeling, risk management, stakeholder mapping, project reporting and monitoring. The workshop was highly interactive and was based on a mixed learning method, through the use of presentations alongside case studies conducted in groups on -specific projects extracted from the ESA Regional Strategy. The participants presented their projects to a mock donor board. This required each group to present and justify the relevance of a project based on a prepared Project Initiation Document.

The WCO East and Southern Africa region adopted its 2018-2021 Regional Strategy in May 2018. The Strategy includes 4 Strategic Areas, namely Intra-Regional Regional Trade, Fair and Efficient Revenue Mobilization, Intra-Regional Compliance and Enforcement; and Professionalism through human capital development. In the spirit of regional development, the ESA Commissioner-Customs have indicated that the regional structures (Regional Office for Capacity Building, Regional Training Centres) of the region are expected to support the operationalization of the ESA Regional Strategy. As a result, the ESA region had requested the WCO Secretariat to build the capacities of the regional structures in the area of Project Management in the framework of the WCO-ESA Project, funded by Finland.

In his closing remarks, the Director of the ESA Regional Office for Capacity-Building, Mr. Liza, expressed satisfaction with the level of commitment the regional structures had demonstrated and thanked them for making the training successful. He said “This workshop can be considered as the catalyst and foundational workshop for the operationalization of priority initiatives of the ESA Regional Strategy.  He expressed the ESA Region desire for further WCO assistance in project management and other areas of organizational development. The regional structures have agreed to finalize the ESA Regional Strategy Implementation plans in the next few months for submission to the ESA Governing Council in May 2019. For further information about this activity, please contact (capacity.building@wcoomd.org).