14 November 2016, Tokyo, Japan - The UNITAR Hiroshima Office has completed the UNITAR Hiroshima Women's Leadership in Tsunami-based Disaster Risk Reduction Training Programme for World Tsunami Awareness Day 2016. Conducted in collaboration with the Government of Japan and the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction (UNIDSR), the workshop was successfully held between 30 October to 7 November 2016 in Tokyo, Sendai and Wakayama. Twenty-six senior female participants, selected from fourteen Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS) including: Cook Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, Fiji, Marshall Islands, Kiribati, Nauru, Niue, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Tonga, Tuvalu, and Vanuatu, completed the training programme. In order to encourage both the development of a Community of Practice, as well as national, regional, and supra-regional discourse, participants from each country included one representative of government, and one of civil society.

26 – 27 October 2016, Bangkok, Thailand – A first Regional Training Workshop on “Developing National Evaluation Capacities to Support the Implementation of the 2030 Agenda” was jointly held by UNITAR and UNDP Bangkok Regional Hub on 26-27 October 2016 in Bangkok, back-to-back with the major Regional SDG Knowledge Exchange Forum. The workshop was organized in collaboration with other UN agencies and partners, including professional evaluation networks, and was attended by 30 participants, mainly government officials, UN staff and representatives of CSOs and VOPEs, primarily from six countries: Indonesia, Malaysia, Mongolia, Nepal, Pakistan and Philippines.