IMO’s Juvenal Shiundu today (11 Nov) spoke about "The role of the maritime sector and the blue economy in Africa's renaissance" at the African Maritime Domain Conference 2014 (9-12 Nov), which is being held in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. The conference is being attended by 300 participants and has been organized by the Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) in partnership with the South African Maritime Safety Authority (SAMSA) and the International Ocean Institute – Southern Africa (IOI-SA)), upon a request of the African Union (AU) to SAMSA.
IMO has a robust technical cooperation programme that gives priority to Africa in the allocation of resources to help its countries build their capacity to deal with some of the major challenges in the maritime domain. A new approach to capacity building for maritime development in Africa is based on Country Maritime Profiles, which aim to identify capacity-building needs.