Customs capacity building is the work of making a customs administration better at its job and keeping it that way after the advisers have gone. It is different from a reform report, which tells an administration what to change, and from a system implementation, which gives it a new tool. Capacity building changes what the people in the administration know how to do: how they assess risk, value goods, verify origin, audit traders after clearance, run a single window or negotiate with other border agencies, and how they teach those skills to the officers who come after them.
Global Customs Compliance has delivered customs capacity building for twenty years, in some sixty countries, for the European Union, GIZ, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, UNDP and national governments. The practice is led by James Lenaghan, who ran a customs administration as Director of Customs at the Mauritius Revenue Authority and served as Vice-Chair of the WCO East and Southern Africa region. That experience of running an administration, not only advising one, shapes how we work.
What we build capacity in
Our capacity-building work concentrates on the functions that determine whether a customs administration collects the revenue it should, controls the risks that matter and clears legitimate trade quickly: risk management and selectivity, including the drafting and governance of selectivity rules; customs valuation and post-clearance audit; tariff classification and rules of origin; authorised economic operator programmes and supply-chain security; single window and the coordination of border agencies; implementation of the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement and the operation of national trade facilitation committees; and customs legislation and procedures, from gap analysis to drafting.
How we deliver it
We start from a diagnostic of what the administration can already do, because training people in what they know wastes their time and the donor’s money. We then design a programme around cohorts rather than one-off workshops: a group of officers who work through structured training, apply it to live cases in their own administration, and receive technical backstopping between sessions while they do so. Where the subject allows, we leave behind a written reference, such as the two Risk Management Compendiums produced for Cambodian Customs, so that the knowledge outlives the officers who first acquired it. We prefer to train trainers and to build the administration’s own capacity to sustain the programme, and we measure the result by what the administration does differently afterwards, not by the number of people who attended.
Assignments
Examples of our customs capacity-building work include four years leading the modernisation of risk management at Cambodian Customs for GIZ, with successive cohorts of trained risk analysts; the design and delivery of a capacity-building programme on the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement for Indonesian government agencies and the private sector under the EU’s ARISE Plus Indonesia programme; the set-up of a GIZ project to modernise Ethiopia’s customs management system, including a training programme to close capacity gaps in customs and valuation; three years as key customs expert on the EU’s technical assistance programme for Vietnam, covering single window, AEO and border IP enforcement; and transit and trade facilitation work across the five Central Asian states for the UNDP Border Management Programme. The full list is on the Projects page.
Who we work with
We work for customs administrations directly and, more often, through the development partners that finance their reform: the European Union and its implementing contractors, GIZ, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank and UNDP, and the consulting firms that lead their programmes. We take team-leader and key-expert roles on multi-year programmes and short-term expert roles on specific components, and we are used to the reporting, logframe and procurement disciplines that each of those partners requires.
If you are designing a customs reform or trade facilitation programme and need a capacity-building component that will still be working in five years, or you are a consulting firm assembling a team and need a customs specialist with delivery experience, contact us.