The World Customs Organization (WCO) provided capacity building to enhance Coordinated Border Management (CBM) and Data Standardization during a two-week in-country Workshop from 23 February to 7 March 2025 in Maseru, Lesotho. The Workshop brought together representatives from all border authorities and representatives from the private industry involved in international cross-border trade. Building on the virtual sessions for developing an inter-agency standard regulation framework by modelling and designing the business process models for border controls, the CBM Working Group focused on harmonizing and standardizing documentary requirements across government agencies to enable digitalization and a coordinated information flow (CIF). This exercise, leveraging the WCO Data Model App, resulted in a comprehensive and harmonized national data catalogue aligned with the WCO Data Model to facilitate communications among border agencies using international standards. The WCO CBM capacity building support provides an essential building block on CBM as part Lesotho’s longer trade facilitation journey.

By the end of the two weeks in Maseru, a draft of the inter-agency standard regulation framework had been completed and was ready for consultation within each border authority. In addition, 89% of the data sets for the CIF were finalized and prepared for review and approval.

Representatives from the Heads of Border Agencies (HoBA) and the National Trade Facilitation (NTFC) underlined the Lesotho Government’s commitment to implementing the WTO Trade Facilitation Agreement and fostering international trade. They also appreciated the continuous multi-year support from the WCO Accelerate Trade Facilitation Programme funded by His Majesty’s Revenue & Customs (HMRC) of the United Kingdom.

Please see here for more information on the ‘Accelerate Trade Facilitation’ Programme. The WCO Accelerate Trade Facilitation Programme looks forward to continuing its partnership with the Revenue Service Lesotho (RSL) for sustainable Customs and border reforms.

For more information on WCO capacity building, please contact Capacity.Building@wcoomd.org.