Caribbean Capacity-Building Program in Geospatial Tools

With additional funding from USAID, SERVIR-Amazonia expanded the geographic impact of the Program by providing training and facilitating technical engagement with government, universities, research institutions and NGOs in the Caribbean.

SERVIR-Amazonia prioritized inter-institutional collaboration and stakeholder interaction, and strengthened capacities in the Caribbean that are needed to develop sustainable geospatial applications and services related to monitoring land use and land cover change in mangrove ecosystems and forecasting and monitoring of hydrometeorological events. The main activities were: 1. Facilitation of technical and research exchanges. 2. Capacity-building and training in geospatial services and applications. 3. Sharing SERVIR-Amazonia's unique strategic approach to service and product development and delivery.

Under the Caribbean training component of the SERVIR-Amazonia Program, a series of engagement activities was implemented over the course of two years. Following the SERVIR Global goal to improve the role of geospatial information technology (GIT) in decision-making across the region, five countries were selected for technical engagement and targeted capacity-building: Barbados, Dominican Republic, Guyana, Suriname, and Trinidad and Tobago.

The program starts with a stakeholder mapping and needs assessment exercise, it then schedules science and data knowledge exchanges and develops a targeted capacity-building plan to increase the skills and knowledge of Caribbean organizations.

The main results of the program in the Caribbean are:

Five new websites have been developed and are now available on the SERVIR-Amazonia  GitHub platform . These websites contain comprehensive content of all the training sessions delivered in the 5 countries.

Empowering Women in the Caribbean to Monitor Mangrove Forests and Acquire Leadership Skills

Empowering women in scientific and technological areas is one of the SERVIR-Amazonia Program’s cross-cutting themes. To this end, a new workshop was held last August on the “Empowerment Women in Mangrove Forest Monitoring and Leadership”, hosted by the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT, and funded by the Knowledge Exchange for Resilience Program of the Arizona State University (ASU).

This event was attended by young professionals, who have been trained by the SERVIR-Amazonia Capacity Building Program delivered in the Caribbean and the Amazon. Its work is mainly focused on the conservation and protection of mangrove forests within these key biomes. A total of 14 representatives from the Dominican Republic (INTEC), Ecuador (Fundación EcoCiencia), Colombia (IDEAM, Colombian National Natural Parks System), Peru (Sernanp), Trinidad and Tobago (Institute of Marine Affairs), Surinam (CELOS), and Guyana (NAREI Institute) were brought together at the Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT premises for three days on early August.

SERVIR Caribbean Buildathon

For three days, an exchange of knowledge took place during a comprehensive event known as Buildathon, held at the Bioversity Alliance and CIAT campus in Palmira, Colombia. Fourteen experts from Guyana, Suriname, Barbados, Grenada, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Dominican Republic, all participants in our Caribbean training program, convened to delve deeper into six projects of vital importance for their respective countries. The scarcity of information or reliance on outdated data poses a significant challenge for geospatial professionals in the Caribbean region. To address this, SERVIR-Amazonia organized this crucial meeting, during which success stories related to ecosystem coverage and mapping, as well as water modeling, were shared. The meeting also explored soil studies from the Amazon region that hold the potential for replication in the Caribbean. In an exciting day, geospatial professionals also received workshops on project monitoring and effective communications, thus reinforcing their capabilities to influence decision makers. Finally, each country presented the development of its project, explaining the problem and context, the methodology used, the results obtained and a roadmap. These were evaluated and the most outstanding projects were awarded

Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago, Dominican Republic, Guyana, and Suriname.

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