We provide trade related technical assistance support to businesses and governments in the development of sustainable trade policies and the implementation of enabling regulatory environments for equitable economic growth. We have a particular specialism in trade in services and regional integration and work with public and private sector clients in Regional Economic Communities (REC) in Europe, Africa, and Asia.
Our technical assistance support includes designing and delivering training courses, facilitating dialogues, stakeholder consultations, focus groups, and workshops for clients in both the public and private sectors.
Here is some of our work in this sphere:
We supported the Laos Ministry of Industry & Commerce and all the relevant domestic ministries and nascent professional regulators to ensure Laos’s compliance with its ASEAN commitments for developing mutual recognition agreements for professional qualifications. In doing so, we also set out how the seven professions involved (doctors, dentists, nurses, accountants, architects, engineers, and surveyors) could be developed to meet the country’s own domestic interests and what regulatory infrastructure would be needed.
When the Seychelles joined the WTO in 2015, it committed to opening its market to foreign professional service providers. But since there was little regulation of these services in the country, the government was struggling to understand how it could honour its obligations, ensure clients could access the services they needed whilst also developing opportunities for the embryonic local professions. We helped the government to understand the existing regulatory models for architects, engineers, accountants, and quantity surveyors and set out a new recommended model which would combine the registration and administrative tasks common to all the professions into a single Authority for the Licensed Professions.
The World Bank published a study in January 2016 which suggested that South Africa could increase its GDP by up to 0.5 percentage points by improving the functioning of its professional services markets. We were asked by our client, a foreign funding agency, to identify all of the issues for the professional and business services sector that had been flagged by international institutions, the South African government itself, the foreign investor community and the local private sector in recent years. We then designed a programme of potential cooperation projects, which also identified international public sector and professional services partners who would be willing and able to contribute to specialist technical assistance projects across the sector.
Hook Tangaza was commissioned to undertake a regulatory mapping (inventory) of eight key services sectors in Sri Lanka that would assist with identifying areas in which Sri Lanka’s regulatory framework needs updating and to provide a tool to prioritise other sectors for detailed analysis. The project assisted the government of Sri Lanka to identify priority areas for regulatory reform and trade negotiations and made recommendations on how to improve the regulatory framework in each sector.
The East African Community aims to create a single market for qualified professionals across the region. Over a series of projects since 2013, we have supported this process. We have advised the EAC Secretariat on the legal instrument for implementing Mutual Recognition Agreements (MRAs). We have worked with the competent authorities for East African engineers, accountants, and architects to retool their existing agreements to fit the EAC model and trained their boards and key staff members in complying with the obligations that flow from these agreements.
We were commissioned by a multilateral organisation providing trade negotiation support to developing countries to equip the client government’s trade negotiators and other officials with accessible, explanatory briefs on key issues for negotiating bilateral, regional or multilateral trade agreements. This capacity-building project helped to ensure a harmonized and coherent approach to both the National Export Strategy and existing trade policies.
We are member of the AIFC Legal Regulation Advisory Panel that advises the AIFC Executive on the development of a framework for the regulation of legal services providers registered with the AIFC as part of the development of the AIFC as a global financial centre.
Hook Tangaza provided consultancy support to the government of Sudan on preparing for the next stages of its accession to the WTO especially the economic significance of trade in services. This included convening a public-private dialogue (PPD) on Trade in Services for the public and private sector and training workshops and plenaries for trade negotiators and other public sector stakeholders.
