Lilongwe — The Meteorological Association of Southern Africa (MASA) says since its inception, it has developed a strategic plan which consolidates key priority programmes for the Southern African Development Committee (SADC) member countries.

The plan also includes improvement of weather observations and data communications, capacity building, research and development, improvement of products and services including meteorological applications for the highlighted socio-economic sectors.

In an interview with Malawi News Agency (Mana) during the opening of MASA 7th annual general meeting in Lilongwe, chairperson of MASA Moisẻs Vicente said the objective of MASA is to strengthen the relationship between the SADC countries in strengthening of its services by promoting cooperation and collaboration in the area of meteorology, climate and water.

"In our strategic plan, we have three pillars. The first pillar is enhancing weather observation network. The second one is communication to exchange information and data. And the other one is capacity building. Also, we have the issue of processing data. So, all of these are very important and crucial to strengthen the meteorological services within the region," said Vicente.

"And when we talk about network, we talk about network over the SADC region and all over Africa because to make forecast, we need to have information from all over. We don't have the possibility to make forecast if we are only using forecast from one country.

"As you know weather and climate have no boundaries, so we use all those pieces of information to make our forecast and we need technology and infrastructure. So, to do it together as SADC region, it needs a strategy.

The chairperson further told Mana that since its inception, MASA has had several achievements to its credit in several of its activities.

The first achievement, according to him is the development of MASA constitution, a strategic plan to which some of the actions in it like issues of capacity building have already started being implemented.

Also, MASA has held quite a number of workshops in severe weather forecasting demonstration and on Aviation Quality Management systems.

He said, these amongst others are very important to a country to capacitate reaching the requirements of World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and then to have ISO standards for a country to attain certification.

Currently, only five SADC member countries have been ISO-certified and Malawi is not amongst the certified.

According to him: "The near future is, of course, to have better cooperation to move in the same direction and to push all of us to be in the same level and improve service delivery so that we can save lives of the people and protect our properties; that is what MASA is supposed to achieve," said Vicente.

MASA is a SADC Association concerned with regional cooperation in weather, climate and water.

Its vision is to transform National Meteorological Services in the SADC region into well developed and integrated institutions for the provision of high quality weather and climate products and services.