A three-day high-level regional workshop on mechanisms for promoting maritime domain awareness in the West Indian Ocean is taking place (18-20 May) in Dar es Salaam, United Republic of Tanzania, with 45 participants from Comoros, Djibouti, Kenya, Madagascar, Mauritius, Mozambique, Seychelles, South Africa, Somalia and Sudan and participating organizations. The workshop is being jointly organized by IMO, U.S Naval Forces Africa (NAVAF), East African Standby Force (EASF), Nordic Advisory and Coordination Staff (NACS) and European Union Naval Forces Somalia (EUNAVFOR), under the auspices of the Djibouti Regional Training Centre (DRTC).
The workshop aims to identify and address existing maritime domain awareness gaps. Key to this will be an opportunity to develop maritime operations centre standards for the Djibouti Code of Conduct signatories, with a view to promoting interoperability, efficiency, cooperation and best practices between information sharing networks, maritime operations centres and operational maritime law enforcement forces. The workshop will be followed by a two-day maritime domain awareness tools training session, facilitated by NAVAF and EUNAVFOR, on the SeaVision maritime tool that enables users to see ships on a map and view the movement history of those ships and the Mercury internet-based secured communication network, used as an alert and coordination tool by anti-piracy civilian and military stakeholders.IMO’s Kiruja Micheni, Project Officer (Training) Maritime Safety Division and Ms Purity Thirimu, Principal Programme Assistant, IMO Regional Presence Office, Nairobi, are coordinating the workshop. The two events are being hosted by the Surface Maritime Authority of Tanzania (SUMATRA).