Sustainable capacity building approach on the use of Earth observation data: Experiences from HKH

Recently, Earth observation (EO) data and geospatial technology (GT) are getting accessible but skilled professionals and institutional capacities are lacking for effective applications in Hindu Kush Himalayan (HKH) region. Designing efficient and cost effective capacity building (CB) programs fitting needs by diverse users of EO information for decision making will provide options to fulfil this gap. This paper presents the CB approach designed by SERVIR-HKH to strengthen sustainable and gender balanced capacity of governments and development stakeholders. CB focuses to bridge the gap between current trend and progress in EO and GT fields and existing state of capacity within the agencies involved in decision making in agriculture and food security, ecosystem services management, disaster risk reduction and climate services. Our approach promotes genders, adopts frontier technology, brings global leaders as resource person, and provides sustainable solutions. We include standard training courses, ToT-Training of Trainers, OJT-On the Job Training, and high level exposure visit to build capacity of partner institutions, empowering women in GIT to achieve gender balance, big data analysis to support smart decision, SAR training to adopt leading EO technology, and partner involvement in product development to deliver services smoothly. To ensure sustainability, we collaborate with partner agencies for targeted capacity building on specific application to build capacity for self-managing information systems to meet organizational needs. This is achieved through combination of formal curriculum based training and OJT. The ToT programme aims to attain multiplicity of our training courses by developing trainers who could conduct same course independently. We collaborate with universities in the HKH region for the ToT programme. We have successfully developed faculties of Kabul University and Jahangirnagar University on EO for water resources and GEE. These ToT and OJT approaches are playing instrumental role for institutional capacity building in the region. In presentation, we will cover more experiences on gender balanced CB approach, big data analysis, and SAR training. We will also present lesson learned from CB efforts at SERVIR-HKH and how we envision the best practices for other SERVIR hubs.