Shaping the AfriAlliance future activities

23 March 2017

One of the sessions during the second day of the AfriAlliance Launch Conference, hosted by the LoCS4Africa Conference in South Africa, was about shaping the future activities of the AfriAlliance. The session was opened by Stanley Liphadzi of WRC, stressing that Africa can respond to climate change related challenges (such as floods, drought and global warming) by:

• Developing new knowledge and skills capacity: how can we use research to model and map out the risks through R&D, foster knowledge networks, new skills development and improving translation of research findings, communications and training?
• Enhance adaptive capacity: to establish warning and monitoring systems.
• Policy integration and level of readiness: to ensure that continental and neighbouring policy aligned and supportive of cooperation.
• Risk sharing and resilience: establish partnerships with insurance and banks to assist with building resilience and development of drought and flood relief plans

There is a great global shift in approaches to resolve complex global challenges like climate change and water from conventional to integrated approaches that look at challenges in a systemic way and establishing systemic solutions. 

The audience was then invited to use Kahoot, a game-based learning platform. By these means, the audience could provide input concerning shaping the future activities of the AfriAlliance. The following conclusions can be drawn from this exercise:

• 50% of the audience would like AfriAlliance to continue with better identification of needs, demand and solutions for W&C. But it is important to also bring the science into mechanisms and find real solutions to the climate change and water challenges.
• 43% of the audience looks forward to the demand driven outlook of R&I opportunities. It will be important to bridge the knowledge fragmentation and bring real solutions especially for the private sector. There is an opportunity to invent and find new solutions through AfriAlliance coordination and partnerships.
• 49% participants would like AfriAlliance to work harder to overcome the silos in the water and climate sector. Understand what are the issues on the ground at local level and find innovative solutions to break the silos. Focus on regional vulnerability because each region doesn’t necessarily have the same experience and challenges regarding water and climate change. We therefore can not use a blanked approach or solutions.
• 47% of the participants prefers offline interactions (events, meetings and workshops) because there is a lot you can learn and get out of the physical interaction. It may however mean in some cases that AfriAlliance provide incentives especially for the key contributors/role players to cover some of their travel costs to allow them to participate in the physical meeting.

A panel of five experts, including Stanley Liphadzi, Kobie Brand (ICLEI Africa), Bettina Genthe (CSIR), Luuk Diphoorn (Akvo Foundation) and Jean-Marie Kileshye Onema (Waternet), then discussed these outcomes. The AfriAlliance appears to be a good platform that provides different quality information and link to different expertise and institution and contributes to building solutions and enhancing knowledge sharing amongst African and European water and climate change stakeholders.