The final day of the Training of Master Trainers Workshop was primarily interactions with the CAP on a Map project UNESCAP Program Officer: Mr. Alf Blikberg. The participants had the opportunity to present their cases to him. The outline of their presentation discussed the current early warning practices in their country, their satisfaction/dissatisfaction on the training received, expectations complete system requirements, and the strengths/weaknesses of implementing SAMBRO. Project leads also presented a summary of the project overview and next steps.
The country presentations to ESCAP from the Trainees were diverse with each country presenting a different story. The three countries: Maldives, Myanmar, and Philippines believed that the SAMBRO implementation would improve their warning dissemination latencies with the single entry of a message disseminated warning messages through multiple channels to multiple personnel or organizations. These issues, identified during the information stocktaking activities of the project are discussed in the trip reports:
They were also intrigued that SAMBRO could be customized to harmonize with their current work flow practices. These involve message authorization prior to diffusion; preparing a formatted PDF document of the alert message to be used as a paper trail; amending the message at various stages of the hazard event such as the rising, saturation, and receding of the flood waters.
In the case of Myanmar and Philippines it would reduce the time to one minute. However, the Master Trainers were concerned of the effectiveness of SAMBRO give its dependency on the Internet. Alerting Authorities will need to access the centralized SAMBRO instance over the Internet to create, approve, and disseminate the warning messages. Another concern was on the ability to deliver messages to those outside the reach of commercial telecommunications services, like SMS, Email, and Web.
The Master Trainers planned their implementation strategy; namely, implementing the Common Alerting Protocol and operationalizing the SAMBRO system. Their planned activities would begin with presenting the outcomes of the Training of Master Trainer program to their respective department heads. Thereafter, they organize an awareness workshop to discuss the training program, implementation goals, and operationalization strategy with the participating National organizations. They would agree on an implementation plan, including setting dates for the Training of National Trainers, to take place in the next 4 – 8 weeks.
The immediate national-level training will build capacity among the Alerting Authorities to develop their own hazard event specific templates, registering the alert recipients, and testing the alerting procedures. During the last two days of the Training of Master Trainer Workshop in Thailand, the participants developed their own training material reusing material from the workshop. Hey will use the self-developed material to train the fellow countrymen. We are looking forward for the training and implementation to complete over the coming months. Thereafter, the project will prepare to under go the evaluation phase with the controlled simulations.