As the winner of the Region Africa Middle East phase of the Young Freight Forwarder of the Year competition, Fortunate Mboweni of Bidvest Panalpina Logistics is now off to compete on a global platform.

Fortunate’s prize is to attend and participate in the FIATA World Congress in Istanbul in October this year. At this Congress Fortunate and the three other regional winners representing the Americas, Asia Pacific and Europe will compete to become the global winner.

The global winner will receive a total of five weeks training in New York and London, as well as at one of the IATA major centres, with all expenses paid by competition sponsors, the Transit Trade Club and International Air Transport Association. The competition was developed to encourage training in the freight forwarding industry and to further develop the professionalism of young people.

Winners were chosen from dissertations on how they handle all aspects of the international movement of goods that are not the usual run of the mill cargo. Fortunate’s dissertation was called ‘Multimodal transport operations in practice: radio actives and abnormals from and to South Africa.’

Fortunate is a channel controller at BPL and she is currently studying for the Generic Management NQF level 5 qualification.