Coastal Surveillance System

A ceremony attended by senior US and Japanese diplomats, Tanzanian Government officials and the Special Representative of the Secretary-General of the IMO for Maritime Security and Anti-Piracy Programmes, Mr Hartmut Hesse, in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on 17 September 2012 marked the completion of the installation of an integrated radar and automatic identification system (AIS) coastal surveillance system in Tanzania.

 

IMO, in partnership with the Governments of the United Republic of Tanzania and the United States of America, has spent the last 12 months delivering this system which provides a coastal picture to both the Tanzanian Peoples’ Defence Forces as well as the civilian authorities at the Dar es Salaam Maritime Rescue Sub-Centre and the integral Information Sharing Centre.

 

Conceived as a bi-lateral military project between the United States and the United Republic of Tanzania, IMO joined the project to integrate the system for civil and maritime law-enforcement use in order to bring all maritime agencies together to counter the maritime security threats such as piracy that threaten the coast of Tanzania.

 

The ceremony marks the completion of the first phase of a wider programme to provide similar systems in States bordering the Mozambique Channel and its approaches, and the work is being undertaken as part of the IMO’s counter-piracy programme under the Djibouti Code of Conduct funded by contributions to the Djibouti Code Trust Fund from its donors: France, Japan, Netherlands, Norway, Republic of Korea, Saudi Arabia and The Marshall Islands.