European Union Pacific Technical and Vocational Education and Training on Sustainable Energy and Climate Change Adaptation Project (EU PACTVET) - Annual Report Year 2;2016

Address from the Team Leader of the European Union Pacific Technical and Vocational Education and Training Project.

Year 2 started on a positive note with the signing of the Finance Agreement between USP and SPC and the full recruitment of all project staff in August, 2015.

In addition, under the Global Project Management component, a total of 6 internships were offered over the course of year 2. The internships comprised 3-month attachments with time shared between USP and SPC.

The Coordination Committee met 5 times over the reporting period and has proved to be a very positive mechanism to promote the communication, progress reporting and timely and efficient guidance to project issues.

The Communications strategy was refined since the last reporting period and continued to be successfully implemented in providing media coverage for project activities. There is now a project website as part of the wider Pacific Regional Data Repository (PRDR) Sustainable Energy For All (SE4All) database. Additionally, there is a project Facebook page which already has over 200 followers.

Major activities of the project within the reporting period were extensively covered through FB as well as on print media. Under Results Area 1, the training needs consultations for all 15 P-ACP countries was finalised in end-September.

The first three-way agreement between SPC, USP and the Republic of Timor Leste’s National Directorate for Climate Change was signed in September. Two consultancies were undertaken for the project within the reporting period to support the training needs assessment.

Two further events were attended/organised by the project team in efforts to discuss the skills and competencies to be included in the CCA/DRR qualifications. The project inception meeting was held on October 8-9, 2015 in Suva, Fiji. At this meeting, endorsement was obtained on country TNGA priorities and there was consensus for the development of regional qualifications in Climate Change Adaptation and Sustainable Energy.

As part of Results Area 2, the project engaged the Fiji Higher Education Commission (FHEC) from August 2015 to lead the development of the CCA and SE qualifications. The Industry Standards Advisory Committees (ISAC) for both SE and CCA were set up and included regional representation to deliberate on the content of the qualifications.

Regional participation was possible via an on-line system called “Basecamp”. The final meeting of the regional ISAC was held from 16-19th May, 2016 with three global firsts including provisional regional rather than national agreement on government sanctioned qualifications; development of formal qualifications at levels 1-4 (on the Pacific Qualifications Framework) which cover the subject areas of climate change adaptation and disaster risk reduction, and the recognition and professionalization of a “Resilience Sector” via the creation of a Pacific Regional Federation of Resilience Professionals.

The PRFRP is the forum/network at regional/international level linking trainers and educators as well at the industry personnel for accreditation and quality assurance aspect of Resilience qualifications.