The General Secretariat of the Central American Integration System (SG-SICA), through its Energy Coordination Unit (UCE-SICA), launched the regional online training course  "Sustainable Energy and Climate Change for the SICA Region," an initiative developed under the SICA/UNIDO/GN-SEC/ADA Programme which brings together the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), the Global Network of Regional Sustainable Energy Centres (GN-SEC), and the Austrian Development Agency (ADA) aimed at strengthening the technical and institutional capacities of professionals engaged in the energy transition across the eight member countries of the System.

The programme, whose opening session took place on 28 May 2026, brings together 100 selected participants from Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, Belize, and the Dominican Republic, drawn from the ministerial public sector, academia, the energy industry, and the institutions of the SICA System itself. The regional call for applications drew a strong response: 767 applications were received from 23 countries, reflecting the growing interest in specialized energy and climate training across the region.

A structured, application-oriented training programme

The course runs over four weeks, with a total workload of 40 academic hours  equivalent to one university credit of continuing education distributed across ten asynchronous thematic modules and four synchronous sessions delivered via Zoom. The learning path follows a logic of increasing complexity: from the regional climate and energy diagnosis, through renewable technologies, energy efficiency, energy access, governance, climate finance, and Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) systems, culminating in the design of institutional climate-energy strategies and roadmaps.

The content was developed in accordance with international standards of competency-based instructional design and deployed on a Moodle platform featuring interactive resources, narrated micro-lessons, real-world regional case studies, and verified bibliography from sources such as IRENA, OLADE, ECLAC, and the World Bank.