A land and engineering survey training was held on September 2014 in Hargeisa for district engineers and a selected number of university students from related fields of engineering. In total the training had 41 participants.The training was organized by ILO and UN-HABITAT, through the Joint Programme on Local Governance and Decentralized Service Delivery (JPLG), with the aim of improving capacity in the field of engineering community infrastructural development. There was also tremendous support from Ministry of Public Works and Transport (MoPWT) and Road Development Agency (RDA) both in logistics and commitment to the training schedule.


The capacity building training was tailored to meet the specific participant’s needs in land and engineering survey following a pre-training needs assessment workshop session. Fromthe pre-training needs assessment workshop session, it was apparent that most of the participants lacked the technical know-how in the use and operation of modern survey instrumentation in engineering work.The engineers lacked the technical capacity to set up, configure, collect data and post process engineering field survey data for use in engineering design work. Another challenge was that, district officers lacked the pre requisite survey instruments hence could not carry out survey work.This meant engineers used rudimentary survey methods in running their day to day duties.

The training was delivered through class room lectures and field/lab practice exercises. This methodology ensured participants mastered the theory and principles of field survey measurements and application in mapping and engineering work. The participants were able to use their data to generate longitudinal sections of an assumed road corridor and alignment. The participants were evaluated at individual level on their ability to compute errors in observations adjust accordingly and compute coordinates from field measurements. It was notable when a woman engineer took to the floor to teach the rest about the principles and rules of computing coordinates from angles and distances on data collected from the field.

The participants acquired practical skills that they would adopt in their day to day work to ensure appropriate designs production and proper bill of quantities (BOQs) developed.The participants were able to master the operations and handling of the modern survey instruments from set up to data collection.

On the final day of training anoverview of the whole training was done and participants issued with certificates of participation. The trainees thanked the ILO, UNHABITAT, RDA and the MoPWT for organizing such kind of capacity building seminars and urged that more of such initiatives need to be organized. The Director General of MoPWT and ILO administrator then presided over the issuing of the certificates to the trainees.