The Global Facilitation Partnership is a public-private partnership for growth through trade.

According to information from the World Trade Organization (WTO), its mandate is to help governments in developing and least developed countries implement the WTO’s Trade Facilitation Agreement (TFA).

It does this by bringing governments and businesses together as equal partners to identify opportunities and address unnecessary red tape and delays at borders and to design and implement targeted reforms that generate commercially measurable results.

Alliance projects help create an environment in which companies can do business more easily, with predictable procedures, simplified regulations and modern automation.

From the WTO’s perspective, the resulting increase in trade and investment is expected to be conducive to inclusive economic growth and poverty reduction.

The Alliance is led by the Center for International Private Enterprise, the International Chamber of Commerce and the World Economic Forum, in collaboration with the Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ).

It is funded by the governments of the United States, Canada and Germany.

Facilitation Partnership

The Alliance is currently implementing 17 projects in developing and least developed countries and has completed 16 others.

These projects support countries in implementing the TCA through a three-pillar approach:

• Fostering public-private partnerships by bringing governments and businesses together as equal partners to address barriers to trade, using a wide range of platforms to help all parties better understand each other’s perspectives, identify the root causes of trade problems and find ways to solve them collectively.
• Produce outcomes that translate the confidence of public-private partnerships into trade facilitation reforms in support of commitments to implement the TFA. Governments and businesses jointly create and implement projects, producing tangible quantitative results for both parties.
• Measure the impact of trade facilitation interventions, showing how projects reduce the time and costs associated with trade for both business and government.