IMO has a long record of training and continuous capacity building  of local inspection and certification offices. 

Within the IMO group, there are by now more than 15 highly qualified local inspection offices and numerous individual representatives.  IMO offices work according to a quality manual that is agreed by the group, but act as fully independent local economic and organisational units. Three of these offices have by now been accredited as certification offices according to EN45011 by the German Accreditation Service DAP.
 
With this experience background IMO is a highly professional and well qualified partner for setting up local inspection and certification capacity for new certification bodies, e.g. in developing countries.  Examples of IMO's experience in building up local certification bodies include the following cooperations and projects:

• Balkan Biocert (Bulgaria): in this SECO financed project under the coordination of  FibL (Switzerland), IMO is in charge of continuous support and training in inspection and certification as well as re-certification for the international market in the first years of activities. Balkan Biocert has recently been acredited EN45011.
• Ugocert (Uganda) & Tancert (Tanzania):  One of the activities of the EPOPA Project (Export Promotion for Organic Products from Africa) is the development of two local inspection and certification bodies in East Africa.  IMO is EPOPA's partner for certification in Tanzania and Uganda and works with Ugocert and Tancert since the beginning.  Presently the main focus is still on development of inspection capacity according to all standards of importance for East African operators, most of which are huge smallholder groups.
• over its more than  20 years of activity, IMO has supported and supervised many organic certification bodies most of which are by now acting as independent certifiers, e.g. ECOA (Egypt), COAE (Egypt), AOPEP (Bolivia), Biopa (Croatia), Certimex (Mexico), econiva (Russia)