AfricaPress-Tanzania: TANZANIA Chamber of Commerce, Industries and Agriculture (TCCIA) has launched a training programme for capacity building among its staff on the issuing of electronic Certificate of Origin (eCOs) of all goods manufactured and processed in the country for the export market.
Upon the completion of the training, the TCCIA’s staff will be able to process the Certificates of Origin electronically using computers, or mobile devices replacing the current manual processing of exporting documents.
The online-based issuance of electronic Certificates of Origin was officially launched in February 2014, however, this initiative was not implemented due to lack of knowledge among TCCIA’s staff to offer the service, among other reasons, according to TCCIA’s President Paul Koyi.
Mr Koyi said the current manual issuance of the export documents, among other challenges, it consumes the business community’s time by physically moving between different offices collecting documents and to obtain necessary approvals.
Again, under the current manual system, the business community incurs extra costs in doing business attributed to manual processing of export documents in terms of administrative bureaucracies and transportation costs.
To begin with, TCCIA has started to train its staff in Lake Zone regions including Kigoma.
“The training will be conducted across the country in order to ensure our staff have the capacity to issue electronic Certificates of Origin to business persons,” said Mr Koyi during his official tour of Southern Highlands last Saturday where he held talks with TCCIA’s members including farmers and business persons on various issues related to trade and investment.
TCCIA’s boss further expressed optimism saying the proposed initiative will provide unique innovative means of saving time and reducing costs in the issuance of CO to the business community in the country.
Moreover, the business community has welcomed this innovation and said it would help them in conducting their business with traceable records and at reduced costs.
