Expanding Space Weather Awareness into the Developing Nations

Since Space Weather events are global, it requires international collaborations to understand and mitigate its wide range impacts on an increasingly technological society. Thus, apart from being an integral part of the global effort, it is necessary to mobilize broad support and build international engagement in a very complex independent international community by identifying strategies that can convince and bring not only economically affluent countries but also developing nations into the effort of understanding and mitigation of space weather impacts. In this paper, we will discuss detail strategies that the scientific community, more specifically Boston College, has used to expand space weather education and research into the developing nations during the past one decade. Awareness training and educations have been used as key communication strategies to convince scientists, engineers and even lawmakers from the developing nations that space weather impacts on technologies are real and not confined into the most affluent and developed countries but expand to the developing nations. Such communication strategies quickly bear fruit and the scientific community managed not only placed small-scale instruments to monitor a wide range of space weather events at different locations but also introduced space science education into the curriculum of many universities in the developing nations.