Climate change policy makers, researchers, scientists, practitioners, Heads of International organizations and other stakeholders present interacted with GWP Eastern and West Africa delegates, specifically on WACDEP: its outcomes, implementation strategies, and programme’s beneficiaries, among others. Conference on Climate Change and Development in Africa, specifically the CCDA-III Exhibition, provided effective opportunity for participating institutions to gain additional exposure and knowledge of GWP Eastern and West Africa through Africa’s program - Water, Climate Development Programme.
Themed: Africa on the run: can the opportunities from climate change spring the continent to transformative development?, the conference presented an opportunity for various stakeholders to deliberate on Africa’s development in the context of climate change.
GWP Eastern and West Africa participated in the conference with the guiding objective to showcase WACDEP and generate feedback from participants about the program. Sustainability strategy of WACDEP stood out as prominent feature of the feedback generated from participants. To this end, knowledge management and communication materials: books, synthesized reports, newsletters, brochures, pull up posters focused on WACDEP were exhibited through a reserved booth shared by GWP Eastern and West Africa.
Lessons learned include: increasing international recognition and renewed impetus to address climate change in Africa, wide knowledge gaps between knowledge producers and knowledge-users - mostly farmers, the interface between science-development and policy is not yet fully strengthened. As a result, participants resolved, among others to reinforce knowledge management and communication capacities to address knowledge and information gaps.
In January 2009 Africa Ministerial Council on Water (AMCOW) requested GWP to support the implementation of the 2008 African Union Sharm el-Sheikh Declaration on Water and Sanitation. In response, the Water, Climate and Development Programme(WACDEP) was developed. It is being implemented in Eastern, Western, Central and Northern Africa and Southern Africa.
The conference was organized under the auspices of Climate for Development in Africa (ClimDev-Africa), a joint programme of the African Union Commission (AUC), the United Nations Economic Commission for Africa (UN-ECA) and the African Development Bank (AfDB).
The conference sought to address the need for improved climate data and information for Africa, as well as to strengthen the use of such information for decision-making by supporting analytical capacity, knowledge generation and sharing.
For more information, download key documents from : http://www.climdev-africa.org/ccda3-conference-documents