Capacity building

It is our priority not only to deliver a reliable and good quality ICT solution, but also to train the relevant staff and organisations to optimally benefit from the information and tools provided. To increase the capacity of people and organizations working with our services, we undertake capacity development at different levels.

• We help institutions to build up human resources in our fields of expertise – agrometeorology and hydrometeorology – in a sustainable manner to ensure long-lasting capacity and become independent of third parties when it comes to management of elementary tasks, e.g. weather forecasting, meteorological modelling, warning services and emergency operations. This also contributes to our mission to team up and build partnerships with public and private organisations and ensure equivalent parties in strong value-adding service chains.
• We support building up capacity, for example staff members of Meteorological Agencies, with capacity interventions. These are often multiple-day sessions on the topics of Ensemble Numerical Weather Predictions, validation and evaluation of weather models, programming, ICT solutions and development of Public Private Partnerships.

“There is a real added value in helping our local partners to build up capacity and give them the needed training, so they can understand and use our services provided in the right way”

• We organise practical trainings with our local-partner organisations on the topics of weather forecasting, agro-meteorological services and decision making under uncertain circumstances. These are often train-the-trainer sessions to pass the knowledge on to extension officers or development agents (the trainers), who in their turn are in contact with farmers. The farmers are finally supported in understanding the weather information provided to them. In this way, a cascade of knowledge transfer is being generated and embedded in the local context.
• In the process of developing agro-meteorological services, it is key to bring together agronomist knowledge with meteorological knowledge. To enable this, we organise different co-creation workshops with relevant partners. During such workshops, the goal is to exchange agronomic and meteorological knowledge, to define and design new operational models for crop advisories or services.