Fifty-nine senior and mid-level government officials in Angola have completed an UNCTAD training course on productive capacities and poverty reduction.
The course took place from 29 April to 3 May at Angola's Ministry of Commerce, in Luanda, as part of the UNCTAD TrainForTrade programme. Twenty-two of the graduates were women.
The workshop was formally titled Productive Capacities and Poverty Reduction in Least Developed Countries: The Case of Angola. The main institutions represented were Angola's ministries of commerce, industry, agriculture, finance, energy, and petroleum; the Angola National Investment Agency; the European Commission; and the national secretariat of the Southern African Development Community. Among those completing the course were eight national directors of the Ministry of Commerce.
The workshop built upon a seminar on productive capacities and poverty reduction that was held in 2009 as part of TrainForTrade's project for Angola. The project was financed by the European Commission from 2007 to 2011. The recent workshop was prepared and delivered in the framework of the Memorandum of Understanding that was signed between UNCTAD and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) office in Angola in December 2012, and took place with the collaboration of UNCTAD's Division for Africa, Least Developed Countries and Special Programmes (ALDC). The workshop was delivered by Rolf Traeger, Economic Affairs Officer at ALDC.
The Angolan Minister of Commerce, Rosa Escórcio Pacavira de Matos, presided over the opening ceremony, which was attended by more than 100 representatives of public and private institutions. Samuel Harbor, Country Director of UNDP Angola, and Josep Puig, General Coordinator for Cooperación Española, also took part in the ceremony.
On completion of the workshop, participants requested UNCTAD to develop and deliver additional courses on productive capacities and poverty reduction.
The workshop received wide media coverage. This included a report on the evening news bulletin of Televisão Pública de Angola, the national television channel, as well as several articles in Jornal de Angola, the country's biggest daily newspaper.
