GoGIN
The Gulf of Guinea Inter-regional Network
Download the technical fiche in Englishand in Portuguese
The YARIS platform will become the information sharing tool amongst the 27 maritime centres of the Yaoundé Architecture, their partners and all stakeholders involved within 6 000 km off the coast. Conceived primarily as a maritime situational awareness (MSA) tool, it allows both to know what is going on at sea and to coordinate crisis situation operations. It also incorporates email and videoconference services.
YARIS exemplifies the collaborative approach developed by the European Union to combat piracy and respond to the current maritime security challenges that the coastal Gulf of Guinea State members are facing, such as drugs and arm trafficking, illegal fishing, environmental damages …
The technical specifications of the YARIS platform have been jointly developed by the GoGIN team and a group of representatives from the Yaoundé Architecture maritime centres (ICC, CRESMAO, CRESMAC and MMCC). The functionalities of the system have then been approved and improved according to the needs of the users. After contract award by the Zertive-XSealence-SplendidAdvice consortium, dialogue was further strengthened amongst all stakeholders to ensure that the tool responded to all the identified user’s needs.
An initial version was delivered in May 2020 allowing centre partners, as future trainers, to get familiar with the different functionalities of the platform. Since August 2020, a training version is online for training the trainers and mentoring the users. The operational version will be deployed in the centers from May 3, 2021.
The platform is up and running and includes several modules allowing securely to:
More concretely, the modules appear as follows:
⇒ Management of operational situations : each routine, crisis or specific situation is created by a centre which, while remaining process owner, can share it with the other centres. Each operational situation is monitored using the three following applications:
⇒ Authorisation management: the system combines several authorisations : user profile (administrator, decision maker, supervisor, operator, guest, etc.), confidentiality level (confidential, private, public) and scope (local, national, regional, zonal, inter-regional and international). A central system administrator and a local administrator per centre are entitled to define access rights and usage conditions.
Download the technical factsheet on security and maintenance
YARIS is only accessible to authorised users, appointed by partner countries, the maritime centres and regional organisations. YARIS is ready for operational usage and will go live on May 3rd. The centers already trained by then (MMCC zones D & F, ICC, CRESMAO, CRESMAC, maritime centres of Cabo Verde, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Gabon, Ghana) will start using the system on their day-to-day operations, and the remaining centers will follow, as the training for the operational usage and for the technical and operational management of the system is provided by GOGIN, until the end of the project, in August 2021.
YARIS contains the latest technologies and processes to ensure an adequate level of information security. It is hosted by AHP in a secure cloud environment.
The GoGIN project, due to end in August 2021, is organising a transfer of the YARIS platform together with the regional organisations ECOWAS, ECCAS and CGG as well as key political and strategic decision makers of the Yaoundé Architecture. This transfer includes:
Thanks to this process YARIS will become a genuine regional platform contributing to increasing maritime situational awareness in an efficient and cost-effective way.