On 13-14 November, Armenian experts conducted a national workshop for the country’s rescue personnel, building on their experience from a recent workshop in Denmark.
The event was organised after a regional training-of-trainers workshop was held in Denmark in July with support from the EU-funded Programme on Prevention, Preparedness and Response to Natural and Man-made Disasters in the Eastern Neighbourhood Area (PPRD East 2).
Ever since the Spitak earthquake in Armenia in 1988, the international community has made huge strides to improve arrangements for coordinating foreign disaster assistance.
The certification of urban search and rescue teams, procedures for establishing on-site operations coordination centres and guidelines for host nation support are just a few examples of such arrangements.
The PPRD East 2 Programme has promoted and trained the use of such arrangements through training courses, tabletop exercises, a full-scale field exercise and the regional workshop held in Denmark.
The workshop was in the “training-of-trainers” format, as the participants from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, the Republic of Moldova and Ukraine are expected to arrange similar workshops in their own countries.
