The Pacific Community (SPC) through the Pacific Islands Emergency Management Alliance (PIEMA) project has provided funding support for 53 trainers to undertake the International Skills Training and Assessor (IST) Course delivered by the Australia Pacific Training Coalition (APTC) in June to October 2020.
The trainers, who have now successfully graduated from this course, were chosen from PIEMA agencies (National Disaster Management Offices, Police, Armed Forces, Fire and Emergency Services) across five countries â Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands and Vanuatu.
The course was delivered to upskill these national trainers in their ability to develop, deliver and assess competency-based training. The partnership with APTC is in line with the PIEMA projectâs sustainable capacity development model of reducing dependency on training provided by external partners by supporting sustainable methods of providing fit-for-purpose accredited training to disaster management practitioners in the region.
Fiji Police Force Inspector, Mr Jonati Daucakacaka said the course was valuable and there were a lot of learnings throughout the training including the chance to network with other emergency responders from Fiji.
âThereâs areas of improvement that we need to work on, being in a room with the other emergency response agencies gave us the opportunity to network, share ideas with each other and see how we can assist one another in terms of our core roles. This is an exercise we need to do more often to strengthen our relationships with other agenciesâ, he said.
PIEMA Project Manager, Patrick Haines said this training was the first of its kind for emergency management agencies across the five countries.
âThis course enables PIEMA agencies to develop, deliver and assess workplace training at the national level without relying on external facilitators â something that is becoming very important in the current covid context.â, he said.
SPC wishes to the Government of Australia and New Zealand for their continued support towards its implementation of the PIEMA project across 14 countries in the region.
