Le Havre is located at the crossroads of the world economy, the perfect location for IPER! This ambitious project pooled the expert knowledge of the entire Le Havre port community. Before long, it had gained solid support from exceptional partners such as HAROPA (Port of Le Havre) and the International Maritime Organization (IMO). 

To fulfil our aim of transferring our knowledge, we began to develop tailor-made programmes for professionals in the maritime and port sector. This provided a great opportunity to share experiences, pool knowledge, and to help professionals to develop their practices and showcase their successes!  At the time, we did not dare to imagine that IPER would eventually support thousands of experts,  nor that they would come from all corners of the earth (Algeria, Argentina, Cameroon, Colombia, Ivory Coast, the Philippines and Togo) for our port operations and management higher education training.  We hadn’t dared imagine that women would travel from all over the world to attend our exclusively female excellence training, launched in 2008, to fulfil the UN’s Millennium Development Goal no. 3: “Promote gender equality and empower women”. Women now play a key role in the maritime and port industry, and we have continued to pursue this goal, with our 2019 World Maritime Day adopting the theme of “Empowering Women in the Maritime Community”.