The Regional Capacity Building Coordination Working Group, also known as RCBWG is one of the two working groups of the CGPCS. It is mandated to coordinate the capacity building work of the international community in the Western Indian Ocean region and to ensure that overlap and duplication are avoided, and resources are invested efficiently.
The group, which is chaired by the Government of Kenya and the Indian Ocean Commission and supported by Oceans Beyond Piracy as Secretariat, meets 2-3 times per year, with one meeting usually held back to back with the plenary.
Coordinating capacity building is an intricate task, not only because of the sheer number of donors, providers, and implementers involved, but also because it is often unclear what capacity building work should include, how it should be done, and with which priorities.
The RCBWG held its first meeting of 2018 on the 1st of March in Nairobi. The meeting is held back to back with the Safeseas Symposium on Maritime Security Capacity Building. The symposium focusses on the strategic dimension of how to improve capacity building on the basis of a best practice toolkit launched at the event.
The RCBWG meeting focussed in particular on an exchange of the priorities and gaps that regional countries identify, and on the question of how the three major regional programmes (the Djibouti Code of Conduct (DCoC), the Indian Ocean Regional Information Sharing System (IORIS) and the EU funded project MASE) can be better harmonised.