Identifying and Developing Local Capacity Building Initiatives – Best Practices in Education and Innovative Supplier Development

Abstract

Abstract With Host Countries stepping up their demands and expectations in terms of local content, identifying and developing local capacity building initiatives becomes paramount for IOC/NOCs. This paper presents a process for identifying and developing local content initiatives, in order to achieve challenging local content development objectives and hence increase the acceptability of IOC/NOC operators. Local content –aimed at enhancing skills, developing suppliers and infrastructures of Host Countries in connection with oil & gas field development and production projects –now occupies a predominant place in the oil & gas producing countries. In a competitive context, local content becomes an important - not to say essential - criterion in securing new permit awards or obtaining approval for oil & gas field development plans. It appears paramount to build up a strong industrial fabric and have qualified manpower and contractors. It is all the more important that after the appraisal-development phases, the operator then requires skilled local / national personnel to produce the oil and/or gas fields for a several decades. This paper describes the process and illustrates it with case studies, i.e. best practices in identifying and developing local capacity building initiatives. These case studies mainly highlight education initiatives and innovative supplier development initiatives, the latter being suppliers of goods but also suppliers of highly technical services like front end engineering and design. This paper is based on best practices applied in the category of Corporate Social Responsibility. Illustrative data include case studies and lessons learnt from local capacity building initiatives implemented in various countries, mainly on the African continent (Nigeria), in Asia (Indonesia) and also worldwide through a specific higher education initiative. The main application of the information provided in this paper is to help IOC/NOC operators to build local content development initiatives, in both education and supplier development.