1. Background and purpose
HELP Logistics and the Kühne Foundation are preparing a customs-readiness pilot for humanitarian health shipments in selected pilot countries. The pilot aims to reduce avoidable customs delays, demurrage, detention, storage costs, and rework by identifying and correcting customs-readiness issues before shipments reach customs.
The pilot will analyze real shipment cases, map country-specific clearance processes, identify recurring errors, define readiness checks, and test a minimum viable solution with selected partners. While local customs experts will provide country-specific expertise, the Global Trade Facilitation and Customs Expert will provide the broader international perspective needed to make the pilot scalable, credible, and aligned with global customs and trade facilitation practice.
This role is a senior customs, trade facilitation, and process-design role with the ability to translate operational customs knowledge into scalable processes, standards, requirements, and solution logic.
2. Scope of work
- Global customs and trade facilitation framework. Provide expert guidance on international customs and trade facilitation principles relevant to the pilot, including import, export and transit procedures, pre-arrival processing, risk management, coordinated border management, single windows, customs valuation, HS classification, origin, exemptions, and regulated goods. Help the team distinguish between global good practice, country-specific requirements, and humanitarian-specific exceptions.
- Cross-country process and requirements design. Work with the local customs experts and project team to compare customs clearance processes across pilot countries. Identify common patterns, recurring bottlenecks, country-specific differences, and areas where a standard pilot methodology can be applied across countries. Support the design of a reference customs-readiness process that can be adapted locally.
- Documentation and data model. Define the core information objects, document categories, data fields, and validation logic needed for customs readiness across countries. This includes shipment, order, commodity, consignee, exemption, permit, certificate, transport, and customs declaration information. Help translate customs documentation requirements into a structured format that can support manual checks first and digital checks later.
- MVP and readiness logic. Support the definition of the MVP scope, including document completeness checks, cross-document consistency checks, content- and country-specific validation rules, readiness status logic, exception flags, and escalation pathways. Help ensure that the MVP remains practical and focused on the highest-impact preventable errors, rather than becoming a generic customs platform.
- Stakeholder and initiative alignment. Advise on engagement with relevant global and regional actors, including UN agencies, customs and trade facilitation bodies, do nor programmes, digital trade initiatives, single-window actors, customs technology providers, and humanitarian coordination mechanisms. Help the team understand where to collaborate, where to avoid duplication, and where the pilot can fill a genuine white space.
- Evidence and scale-up case. Support the project team in defining what evidence is needed to prove value, including baseline indicators, before/after comparison, addressable vs non-addressable delay causes, cost exposure, rework loops, clearance-time reduction, and partner adoption. Contribute to the scale-up recommendation and investment case by identifying which findings can plausibly be replicated across countries and which require local adaptation.