Over twenty five (25) Business Support Organisations (BSOs) across the region are expected to participate in a regional workshop aimed at building their institutional capacities for delivering enhanced trade information services to their respective private sectors.

The overall objective of the programme is to build capacity within the BSO’s for providing enhanced trade information services such as business intelligence analysis, data collection and processing. This initiative is part of a wider programme of increasing the competitiveness of the regional private sector and involves the development of a regional market intelligence portal and the formation of management structures at the national and regional levels that would allow for more effective engagement of the private sector by BSOs based on the trade information needs for SMEs that have been identified.

According to David Gomez, Manager – Trade and Export Development at Caribbean Export, “The programme has been strengthened but maintains an integrated approach that aims to provide technical competence for utilizing readily available tools for providing trade information services and builds on that through the combined provision of specialized training to build capacity for managing data sources and organization of BSO’s at the national level into trade information networks.”

The Regional Trade Information Training Programme will cover topics that help to improve trade information services through better management performance and knowledge of information sources; improve information research services through better knowledge of information research tools and techniques; and deal with issues relevant to establishing a regional trade information network within CARIFORUM and including mechanisms for information exchange. For this, the 2nd Regional Workshop, the agenda has been shortened to six days (instead of eight) and features a couple of new sessions on external trade information sources which augment the regional trade and market intelligence portal being developed by Caribbean Export that is expected to launch shortly.