Agri cluster capacity building in La Paz, Bolivia

The European Space Agency and the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB) organised on 15-19 October a 5-day Capacity Building workshop at the IADB premises in La Paz, Bolivia. A common effort from both insitutions with two ESA´s EO4SD clusters: the Agriculture and Rural Development and the Water Resources Management clusters.

Over 30 participants from Bolivia, Uruguay, Peru and Colombia attended the event with the ultimate objective of increasing their competency in understanding how different satellite systems may support national agricultural programmes. Participants demonstrated during the whole week that they are highly motivated for learning about remote sensing, image processing and GIS, and introducing this technology in their workflow.

The agenda was fully defined and implemented by both ESA clusters (Agriculture and Water) including two plenary sessions per project. In addition, the group was split in different groups for focusing in different specific needs regarding cluster specific sessions.

The whole event consisted in:

• First two days: theory and hands-on about basic EO concepts that were identified as essential for understanding the services. These concepts are: spatial data models; raster data analysis; state of the art sensors and images; EO for agricultural and rural development; visual image interpretation and digital image classification.
• Third day: presentation on institutional information management, overview of services developed for Bolivia for both clusters, uptake assessment.
• Last two days: presentations of the participants, in depth overview of services and products, more hands-on training, round table discussions, evaluation and wrap up.

For the Agriculture cluster, contents have been selected based on capacity building needs identified for targeted projects in Bolivia and Paraguay through interviews, questionnaires and telecommunications involving ITC, service providers and local stakeholders.