Geneva, 15 March 2011 - UNCTAD Secretary-General Supachai Panitchpakdi, and Port of Nantes Saint-Nazaire Director Jean-Pierre Chalus, will sign a memorandum of understanding on 16 March at the Palais des Nations, Geneva. The ceremony will be attended by the Permanent Representative of France to the United Nations Office at Geneva, Jean-Baptiste Mattéi, and representatives of the French-speaking beneficiary countries of the TrainForTrade programme in port-management training run by UNCTAD´s Division on Technology and Logistics, namely: Benin, Cameroon, Djibouti, Gabon, Guinea, Senegal, and Togo. The Republic of the Congo will also be represented, since the Port of Pointe-Noire is likely to join the programme in the near future.
The signing of the agreement will seal the partnership between the Port of Nantes Saint-Nazaire and the TrainForTrade programme for port communities in French-speaking developing countries. Under the TrainForTrade programme, instructors give port-management seminars and experts are sent to the ports of the programme´s beneficiary countries; in this way, some 42 training courses have been held in 17 countries and more than 600 port operators have been trained.
Under the TrainForTrade programme, port-management training is given in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, with the aim of improving managers´ skills in the port communities involved. Instructors trained by UNCTAD, in cooperation with ports of developed countries, provide local training over a two-year period. At the end of the training, after defending their final dissertations before an international panel, participants are awarded an UNCTAD Port Certificate.
The TrainForTrade programme, run by UNCTAD´s Knowledge Sharing, Training and Capacity Development Branch of the Division on Technology and Logistics, is a programme for training and capacity-building aimed at commercial operators in developing countries, with a view to helping beneficiary countries increase their expertise in the areas of trade, investment, finance, port management, and sustainable development.
