AfriAlliance Launch Conference officially opened

22 March 2017

On World Water Day, AfriAlliance had its Inaugural Launch on the African continent. Almost 200 people attended the opening session of the AfriAlliance Conference, that had three inspiring keynote speakers. AfriAlliance Project Director Dr. Uta Wehn opened and chaired the session and emphasised the importance of knowledge sharing and collaboration to bridge the gap between water needs and climate solutions. 

Ms. Carmen Mena Abela, Head of the Horizon 2020 Eco-Innovation sector in the European Commission (EC), introduced H2020 and expressed her support for the AfriAlliance project. She stressed the challenges we are facing and the urgency to act. However the EC also sees opportunities, for example with moving towards a circular economy. 

Ms. Barbara Schreiner, Executive Director of Pegasys Institute, talked about extraordinary technological changes, but also about enormous poverty at the same time. She sees very specific climate change challenges for the African continent. Women are among the ones most affected by climate change. On the flipside, they have also proven to be the most flexible to cope with climate change. She stressed the need for bottom-up innovation, like AfriAlliance aims to do.

Dr. Mandla Msibi gave a speech about ‘Water & Climate: Organising Ourselves for a Different Future.’ He focused on the need to do things differently in three dimensions: shifting our approach, behaviour and level of resource security, with a critical role for science and innovation. He called AfriAlliance an important initiative to work towards such a different future by being a platform where existing networks can connect and collaborate.

At the end of the keynotes, the AfriAlliance project partners got on stage to introduce themselves and revealed what AfriAlliance means to them in one word.