Nicaragua

<p>This project will enhance ITC offerings of global public goods &nbsp; by advancing the development of additional functionalities within the Deforestation-Free Trade Gateway (DFTG) whose development has recently started in March 2024 under the ITC project C374. The DFTG aims to mitigate the potential impact of the new European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) on trade flows between Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the European Union, particularly for economic operators involved in the production and trade of the commodities covered by the Regulation.</p><p>The project will enhance and simplify the utilization of the Producers registry by introducing an invitation mechanism. This mechanism will enable EU operators and exporters to collect and compile the farm-level information from their suppliers through the DFTG, facilitating the substantiation of their Due Diligence (DD) statements. Furthermore, EU operators and LAC exporters will be able to issue a DD self-statement document with the information they gathered through the invitation mechanism.</p><p>The new functionalities under development will undergo testing within the same value chain and pilot countries as the Producers&apos; registry.&nbsp;</p>

<p>This project will enhance ITC offerings of global public goods through the development of a tool, the Deforestation-Free Trade Gateway (DFTG), aimed to mitigate the potential impact of the new European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR) on trade flows between Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) and the European Union, particularly for economic operators involved in the production and trade of the commodities covered by the Regulation.&nbsp;</p><p>The project will develop a functionality, the Deforestation-Free-Trade Producer Registry, for value chain operators in both European and Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) countries to gather evidence that the products they trade do not originate from deforested or forest degraded areas. Thus, &nbsp;the Deforestation-Free Producer Registry will gather the farm-level information that the EU operators need for issuing their Due Diligence Statement.</p>

<p><strong>Central America: Women and E-commerce</strong></p><p>The project Linking Central American Women Business Enterprises (WBEs) with the Global Gifts and Home Decoration Market aims to improve the export performance of women-led-enterprises from Central America to sell online.</p><p>The project beneficiaries are women-led-companies involved in the sale and export of handicrafts for the gift and home decoration industries from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Panam&aacute;.</p><p>The project funded by the European Union (EU) has been implemented between 2018 and 2021 by the International Trade Centre (ITC) in collaboration with the Secretariat for Central American Economic Integration (SIECA) and in partnership with national organizations.</p><p>To achieve its objective, the project has produced five immediate results as follows:</p><ul><li>WBEs have increased their export business management skills for online commercialization.</li><li>WBEs&rsquo; products and services have exhibit enhanced design, quality and compliance with market trends and customers&rsquo; demands</li><li>WBEs have developed high quality digital and promotional material.</li><li>WBEs have established connections with business partners through increased presence on the Web</li></ul><p>WBEs have acquired the technical know-how to fulfil electronic buyers&rsquo; orders.</p>

<p>Clothing is one of the largest industries in the world economy employing 60 to 75 million people worldwide. The negative social and environmental impacts of the fashion industry have been well documented, demonstrating that these impacts mostly occur within the upstream portion of the value chain. Improving traceability is a priority in order to determine how and where parts and components in production processes have been sourced and what are the environmental, social and health risks in the value chain. The action will support enhanced transparency and traceability in garment value chains, through the development of an IT &apos;track and trace&apos; platform that offers customized and open self-assessment and data sharing solutions for value chain stakeholders. Alongside the implementation of this platform, ITC will deliver a training and continuous improvement programme and, in collaboration with private sector partners, implement in a subset of textile and garment oriented countries.</p>