UNCTAD and France today signed a protocol in Bangkok for the financing, by France, of a FF 2,284,000 (US$ 452,000) two-year training project on international trade for Benin, Mali and Burkina Faso. French Minister of Cooperation Charles Josselin and UNCTAD Secretary-General Rubens Ricupero signed the agreement during the tenth United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD X), which opened here on 12 February and continues until 19 February.
The overall objective of the project is to enable the three francophone West African countries to enhance their participation in international trade. The approach is twofold: to create training capacities on particular issues in international trade, and to help lay the groundwork for making the necessary institutional changes. More specifically, the project intends to:
- Strengthen selected specialized training centres to conduct the training of trainers;
- Affiliate with those centres the national or regional officials in charge of international trade issues, and particularly such trade-related issues as the environment, transit, and multimodal transport;
- Design, adapt and update high-quality teaching modules that meet the needs of public and private sector professionals;
- Organize national and regional seminars and training courses on the topics identified by the centres; and
- Facilitate the adoption by the three countries of the necessary reforms in the field of international trade and its impact on the environment.
The project will facilitate and contribute to the strengthening of trade structures and related services in the countries concerned through the development of their human resources, giving them greater control over international trade flows.
The project has three main components:
- Drafting a regional and national plan of action;
- Implementing the practical measures identified during the training in the fields of international trade, the environment, and multimodal transport and transit; and
- Supporting the development of a policy for regional cooperation among all those in charge of programme implementation at the national level (in collaboration with the West African Economic and Monetary Union, UEMOA).
The project is part of UNCTAD’s TRAINFORTRADE 2000 programme, which covers the training of trainers, a worldwide network of training institutes and distance-learning techniques. The programme will play a major role in disseminating the training packages.
