ITC wraps up BESTF after three years of buoying export-led growth in Mozambique (en)

As its three-year Business Environment Support and Trade Facilitation (BESTF) project  in Mozambique comes to an end, ITC is preparing a final report detailing its accomplishments in promoting export-led growth and helping to improve the investment climate in one of the world's poorest and most underdeveloped nations.

Under the initiative, which began in October 2009, ITC helped the Instituto de Promoção de Exportação (IPEX) build its capacity and hone its skills to manage export trade. ITC provided technical assistance to IPEX, which has played a key role in driving Mozambican shipments of value-added products to both domestic and foreign markets.

The successes of BESTF, supported by the European Union and carried out jointly with the United Nations Industrial Development Organisation (UNIDO), are threefold. ITC helped IPEX formulate a national strategy as a tool to identify key export industries and develop strategic plans to generate value-added products within those sectors. It also set up a packaging information centre within IPEX that provides data about importers' requirements to small and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) and created a modern information-management system to provide businesses in the southeast African country with global trade intelligence.