Twenty four participants from Burundi, Chad, Ethiopia, Lesotho, Malawi, Mozambique, Senegal, Sudan, Swaziland, Togo and Uganda attended a UNIDO training course, facilitated by Philip N. Dearden of CIDT that aims to build the regional trade capacity of Least Developed Countries.
The five-day course in the capital of Mozambique, Maputo, was organized by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO) and the ISO Academy, with support from the Enhanced Integrated Framework (EIF) and the Network on Metrology, Accreditation and Standardization for Developing Countries (DCMAS).
“Trade has long been recognized as a potential engine for growth and wealth creation. Developing countries, particularly the Least Developed Countries, continue to face supply-side capacity and trade-related infrastructure constraints which can inhibit their ability to compete on international markets. Therefore, UNIDO and its partners designed this programme to help address these challenges by training experts on how to overcome quality infrastructure related barriers,” said Bernardo Calzadilla-Sarmiento, Director of UNIDO’s Trade Capacity Building Branch who opened the training course.
“The course included a distance learning component that ensures all participants share a common knowledge concerning trade capacity building issues, and a residential part that offered a mixture of technical lectures and dynamic sessions on participatory project design taught by Professor Philip N. Dearden” he added.
During their stay in Mozambique, participants also visited the National Institute of Standards and Quality (Mozambican Instituto Nacional de Normalização e Qualidade), which is supported by UNIDO’s “Private sector and quality promotion programme” implemented in Mozambique.
Representatives from UNIDO, ISO, EIF, DCMAS and local quality infrastructure institutions as well as the private sector all taught on the course alongside Philip N. Dearden of CIDT who taught all the sessions on Project and Programme Design and Management.
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UNIDO has created the following video covering the four-day training:
