The second training session of WP-G was held in São Tomé on 7-18 November 2022. As proposed in the Grant Agreement, the WP-G designed a session to be delivered 100% in Portuguese and take place on an island country for the first time in PanAfGeo. It brought together seventeen delegates from five African Portuguese-speaking countries, i.e. Angola, Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Cabo Verde and São Tomé & Principe, part of the PALOP (Países Africanos de Língua Oficial Portuguesa).
It was jointly organised by BRGM, France (Dr. Marc Urvois, WP-G leader), LNEG, Portugal (Mr. Alain Francès and Mr. Pedro Gonçalves, WP-G trainers), and DGRNE – General Directorate of Natural Resources and Energy, São Tomé & Principe (José Bastos Do Sacramento, Director General). Locally, Mrs. Ana Sofia Ten-Jua De Castro, Mr. Paulo Soares de Barros de Ceita (DGRNE) were also instrumental to the successful organisation of this session.
The ten-day training was organised as classroom-type sessions including lectures (<25%) and hands-on exercises (>75%) on the laptop computers provided by PanAfGeo to each trainee. At the end of the second week, each trainee had to prepare and present a Return-to-Work Plan as his/her active contribution to the WP-G capacity building process.
After the training certificates were formally handed over to each delegate, the concluding remarks were given by Mr. Alain Francès and Mr. Euclides Clemente Félix De Castro, Angola, spokesperson on behalf of the trainees. He highlighted the importance of having organised such a session dedicated to Portuguese-speaking African geoscientists and the difference it made to them having such a session provided fully in Portuguese, while most courses under the PanAfGeo project were so far limited to either English or French speakers.
The pictures of the training session is made available, here.
