Stories

CIDA and ITC meet to discuss progress and future plans

26 January 2012
ITC News

CIDA's Director-General of Strategic Policy, Tobi Nussbaum, visited the ITC offices in Geneva on Tuesday 17 to speak with ITC staff, including Deputy Executive Director, Jean-Marie Paugam, about the organization's work, the results achieved and plans for future work.

The discussions were productive and the ITC team were able to explain their work on CIDA projects as well as the overall organizational strategy for the medium term. Two CIDA funded programmes of note are the Enhancing Arab Capacity for Trade (ENACT) programme and the Programme for building African Capacity for Trade (PACT II).

Working in sub-Saharan Africa, ITC's PACT II programme targets the effectiveness of regional and national trade support institutions by working on improving export competitiveness, market linkages and, thus, the revenue of SME exporters, particularly those owned by women.

The programme does this by supporting the activities of and encouraging collaboration between the three regional economic communities (RECs), namely the Common Market for Eastern and Southern Africa (COMESA), the Economic Community of Central African States (ECCAS), and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

ENACT, a programme which was particularly busy during 2011 reacting to changes in the conditions for exporters in some Arab states, is also a beneficiary of CIDA funding.  The programme focuses on exporters from five countries - Algeria, Egypt, Jordan, Morocco and Tunisia. An example of the work carried out by ENACT is the recent mission to Egypt in which ITC and the Egyptian Ministry of Industry and Foreign Trade formulated a plan to increase the country’s e-commerce capabilities.


From left to right, Tobi Nussbaum (CIDA Director-General of Strategic Policy), Hugo Cameron (First Secretary, Permanent Mission of Canada), Jean-Marie Paugam (ITC Deputy Executive Director) and Nneka Morrison (ITC Programme Officer)