The Costa Rican Investment Promotion Agency (CINDE for its Spanish acronym) was recently designated as the best investment promotion agency in the world by the International Trade Centre (ITC). This is an organization created by the United Nations and the World Trade Organization.

CINDE’s case is used now as reference by ITC to create a comparative evaluation tool, specialized for other promotion agencies that are willing to implement good operative practices, due to the processes and results that CINDE has achieved throughout the last years.

The method developed by ITC has 47 performance measurements based on 225 indicators. This evaluation subdivides in 4 categories: leadership and performance, resources and processes, products and services, and measurement and results.

The worldwide promotion agencies may use this tool to evaluate the quality of the services and develop improvement models, all based on the good practices developed by CINDE.

To create this tool, CINDE had to summit to an evaluation process. The report given by ITC informs textually: “The initial auto-evaluation exercises from CINDE and ITC suggested that the organization was well organized and was professional in its operations with high delivery standards”.

ITC informed that the overall score obtained by CINDE was over 90, which means that it is within the “excellent performance” level. This is equal to a consistent performance in a world class position, with many good practices areas, concludes the report.

The Managing Director from CINDE, Jorge Sequeira, mentioned: “We are proud that a prestigious international organization such as ITC considered us as reference to generate a benchmarking tool. This happens after we realized that we are the best investment promotion agency in the world. It challenges CINDE to increase its quality standards in everything we do. We are 45 collaborators that, within the leadership and vision from our Board of Directors, we work day by day under the premise to be the best in what we do, so this benefits Costa Rica.

Throughout CINDE’s 35 years of existence, it has generated more than 90.000 direct high quality and well-remunerated jobs, as well as has attracted more than 300 multinational companies that everyday export goods and services from the highest quality around the world.