The U.S. government has supported a number of productive lines of effort over the past few years strengthening individual functional areas within the African partners’ maritime sectors. A next critical step is to bring those various threads together to help reinforce an integrated and holistic African response spanning from the maritime incident at sea to the prosecution ashore.
Maritime Safety and Security programs have been held across the continent and have addressed the following objectives:
- Better align U.S. and African priorities by critically evaluating maritime security challenges and gaps facing the African partners
- Enable and reinforce African interagency and regional cooperation in addressing the maritime threats in the Gulf of Guinea by establishing a network of maritime professionals
- Highlight the challenges and mechanisms when cooperating across multiple jurisdictions
- Assess and strengthen a draft model codifying the national and interregional processes, focused on information sharing (maritime domain awareness and law enforcement), interdicting vessels of interest, and apprehending and prosecuting maritime criminals. These focus areas are key pillars within the Code of Conduct