Location
Benin, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Chad, Gabon, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Mauritania, Niger, Nigeria, Republic of Congo, Senegal, Sierra Leone, The Gambia, Togo, Sao Tome and Principe
Topic
Business Regulation and Policy, Resilience and Recovery
Status
Completed
Year
2021
The Regional Office for Capacity Building of the World Customs Administration for Western and Central Africa is based in Abidjan and covers the following 23 countries: Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Chad, Cape Verde, Gambia, Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Ivory Coast, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Burkina Faso, Nigeria, Cameroon, Gabon, the Central African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo and the Republic of Congo.
This intervention is a follow-up from a webinar organised in 2020 on how customs organisations could respond to the crisis.
The ICR Facility supported the ROCB in organising a series of online workshops on topics related to the effects of the COVID-19 crisis on customs organisations.
The objective was to share best practices and promote cooperation between the different national administrations. Representatives from the private sector and international organisations have also taken part. The first workshop took place in July 2021. The first one tackled the subject of human resource management and infrastructure logistics in time of crisis.
In 2020, the ICR Facility organised a webinar on how national customs organisations could respond to the Covid crisis. The ROCB requested short term support to identify important topics for customs administration which were as of yet poorly covered by technical assistance. A survey was conducted, to which 18 national administrations responded. A brief report was published by the ROCB on “The Priorities of Customs Administrations of the West and Central African Region on the Technical and Financial Assistance for Responding to the Covid-Crisis”.
Based on these survey, three topics were identified as priorities human resource management in time of crisis, e-commerce and how customs administration informal sector.
In order to enable national customs administrations to exchange and share experiences on these topics, the ROCB requested support from the ICR Facility to organise three workshops. They were carried out in 2021 and 2022.
The three topics have been incorporated into the ROCB’s 2023-2027 regional strategic plan. The BRRC intends to use the momentum created by the webinar on the informal sector to include the topic in the WCO’s coaching programme which would allow national administrations to push for business environment reforms on this topic.
