A two-day regional workshop on a common training system for customs officers was held in Bishkek from 5-6 April . The workshop was facilitated by European experts from Riga Technical University and the State Revenue Service of Latvia and gathered professionals from customs agencies and higher educational institutions from Central Asia. The wide audience of the workshop was made up by senior-level customs officials and human resources officers, academics and university staff from major universities in Central Asia, such as the Kazakh National University, the Kyrgyz National University, the Finance and Economic Institute of Tajikistan, the State University of Commerce of Tajikistan, and the Higher Military Customs Institute of the State Customs Committee of Uzbekistan.
The key objective of this workshop was to strengthen the institutional links and cooperation between national customs agencies and higher educational institutions preparing customs staff, and to promote a unified and harmonised approach by customs agencies and universities that should be used in relation to educational standards and recruitment qualifications for customs officers.
The delegates exchanged their experience and learned about good practices of EU MS - in particular Latvia - in such spheres of educational system as development of curricula, recruitment of academic personnel, methodological support, and cooperation between agencies and education institutions. Also, professional standards of the European Commission’s TAXUD and the PICARD programme of the WCO were evaluated as well as steps to be undertaken by training institutions for accreditation of curricula by the WCO.
Having presented and discussed a variety of presentations, lessons learned and good practices, the delegates made a commitment to strengthen the cooperation between customs agencies and higher educational institutions, to further pursue their efforts on unification of approaches and requirements towards curricula development, and to continue networking and partnership building with more partners from Central Asian educational institutions.
Based on the workshop’s results, including gaps and challenges jointly identified during the activity, the EU experts will develop ideas on possible steps for Central Asian countries on the way to advancing the educational system for customs officers.