 Good afternoon. My name is Utaveen. I'm based at IGE Delft in the Netherlands and as coordinator of the AFR Alliance project and on behalf of all the AFR Alliance partners it's my pleasure to welcome you to this first webinar in a whole series of webinars that AFR Alliance is now setting up. This first webinar is entitled Strengthening African Stakeholders to Face Climate Change Impacts, the AFR Alliance Project Activities in a Nutshell and that's exactly what we're trying to do today. We're trying to give you a teaser of the many activities that this project has engaged in over the last four and a half years. The work we do as AFR Alliance is set squarely within the context of climate change impacts in Africa and unfortunately we're seeing increasing manifestations of these climate change impacts with droughts, floods, regional differences of course, but also more extreme weather events and as the African content is facing these water and climate challenges at the same time we also know that there are existing solutions. There's existing knowledge and innovation around but we also see that there's quite a gap between the two. They don't quite meet and this is where we've set our work as AFR Alliance. We're trying to act as a bridge for climate change and water-related needs with potential innovative solutions so we're trying to serve as an alliance of networks by conducting existing networks. Overall the main objective that we have is for African and European stakeholders to work together and hold a number of areas, water innovation, research, policy and capacity development with the overall goal of strengthening the preparedness of African stakeholders for future climate change vulnerabilities. We do this also in collaboration amongst a set of African partners who are networks from diverse stakeholder groups, local authorities, water service providers, researchers, scientists etc and the same from Europe so we're bringing two sets of networks and partners with a very international scope together within our consortium and so as a consortium ourselves we're trying to do what we're trying to do for the African continent at large. We're trying to increase collaboration across different networks and across stakeholders from Africa and Europe. In this first webinar we're honored to have with us a whole range of speakers from the AFR Alliance team as we focus on the project in a nutshell you've met myself already. We welcome also David Smith from WENB, Natasha Amorsi from WAIO, Mambo Loren Glagali from WRC in South Africa, Chris Mannes from ITC, Jean-Marie Kilesche from Bortenot and Taryn Quayle from ICLA in Africa and you meet them all in turn as we go through a series of short speech talks. You can always post your questions in the chat as we go along and our speech talks are actually followed by a lengthy question and answers session where we can come back to the questions you've posed throughout. So without further ado I will hand the word to David Smith who will feature to us the AFR Alliance stakeholder map. Thank you very much Uta. So just to give you a brief overview of one of the first activities that we undertook within this project was to have a greater understanding of who exactly are the stakeholders at an African and European standpoint and these were all the stakeholders that are involved in water and climate activities and one of the ways that we were able to actually achieve this map was through social network analysis. Social network analysis is a way of understanding the relationships between organizations through using networks and graph theory. So it gives us an idea of how we can analyze these connections why they connected and the strength of that connection between each of these organizations. So this network map is available on the AFR Alliance website. If you just search for AFR Alliance stakeholders it will come up and you can have a play around with it and to see exactly who is connected to whom on this map. For example if you would like to have an understanding of who the main actors are within the network you can easily do that through the different metrics that are available for use on that map or indeed for example if you'd like to do a project in Ghana for instance and you can type in on that map Ghana it will bring up all the different stakeholders that have been identified and you can see exactly how they connected to one another and indeed how they might connect to your organization. If you aren't yet featured on that map then write to us and we'll be able to send you a short survey that will give you an understanding of who you connected to and how and then we'll update that map to make sure that you are indeed featured within that map itself. So this is just a very short outline of exactly what is this stakeholder map all about but if you'd like to delve in a little bit deeper and to know a little bit more about this AFRI Alliance stakeholder map and who those stakeholders indeed are then of course you can join us for the final AFRI Alliance conference that will be held towards the end of October as part of the Waternet conference so join us there and we can run through a lot more in detail about the AFRI Alliance stakeholder map. With that I hand back to you. Thank you. Thank you so much David. I will take the floor myself to talk us through the approach that AFRI Alliance has taken to matching needs and solutions. Indeed it was very important to know who the stakeholders are but in trying to strengthen the ability of African stakeholders to face climate change we also needed to drill down what their needs were particularly we were interested in what we call organizational needs so at different organizational levels different stakeholders they're river basin organizations, water utilities, local authorities, civil society so we adapted an existing approach the value proposition canvas to an analysis of these organizational needs and did this by involving 130 stakeholders from 36 countries using a structured approach for workshops and interviews to really get a better understanding of what those needs are. From the solution side also there and there was a big scouting effort undertaken by our partner WAIO who via the network of the AFRI Alliance partners and further searches we were able to identify 131 solutions. Having said that there are differences in the level of advance of these different solutions particularly as they should be applied in different contexts till adjustments and adaptations are needed and also thematically we see that there are certain gaps particularly in the field of biodiversity management and water food and security. Now this was not just an exercise to generate paper tigers we have turned these insights into an online tool which is available on our online portal and namely we have created these needs and solutions hub where stakeholders are able to understand what are different needs faced by distinct stakeholder groups so this is very interesting of course for solution providers who want to see who potential customers might be at the same time also stakeholders in need of solutions can look through the solutions database and see what existing solutions are already available. Moreover solutions providers can of course add their solutions to this hub and also we're also continuously further expanding our needs analysis so it's also possible for stakeholders to point out additional needs for perhaps additional stakeholder groups that we haven't been able to analyze yet in detail. So we actually have a webinar dedicated to the needs and solutions hub approach to building it and how it can be used by different users so you're welcome to join webinar four in our series and towards the end of this webinar we have more details on the specific timing of this webinar. I'd like to hand over to Natasha Morsi from WIO who will talk us through what is SIF. Thank you Uta so as you can notice we have a very good progression in this webinar because we have just seen that through the process a lot of solutions have been identified and one of the crucial activity as well of Afri Alliance was to promote the solution but in a certain way not just on the technical aspect but really to consider the technical and non-technological sorry technological solution. So as you can see on the graph you have three other dimensions that will come there to highlight different perspectives and so the different needs that were identified. So the social innovation is really there to tackle the complexity and the societal challenges that also have been identified through our own networks in working obviously as an echo to what has been before us identified on the African continent but as well in Europe so in addition to the technological solution you will find the capacity development the governance structure and also one dimension that is maybe less obvious to capture which is the business roadmap where we tried as well to provide the good insight on what could be the financial dimension for the social innovation. Throughout the project four series of SIFs has been produced as you can see and within one series you would have different sub-topics to cover those four dimensions and I think I don't know if. This is where Mamalodin comes in. From the WRC Mamalodin if you could kindly share with us your reflection on the use of the Afri Alliance social innovation fact sheets for the work of the WRC. Thank you very much Uta and Natasha maybe just to start firstly with where Natasha left with regards to our social innovation fact sheets as the Afri Alliance really looks at these four dimensions if I may say that so from the Water Research Commission perspective the value that we saw in the social innovations that we developed through the partnership with all the other Afri Alliance partners is the way we normally present our innovations we had not used this approach if I may call it that or the dimensions so it helped us as the Water Research Commission to take the innovation or the solutions that we already had and apply this four dimension which then showed us actually that the one solution that we were thinking as more technological had also the three other pillars and we are now using this dimension as we present our innovations going forward and another thing that I think I like is with the Water Research Commission what we do is when we have innovations produced through the work that we fund we normally produce a science brief a technical brief a policy brief if it's relevant and so forth and the way the social innovation fact sheets are packaged for us was a new innovative way of presenting this brilliant innovations it's in a much easier read and an acceptable way by our stakeholders so it's really the packaging I think it's a very good one and then the other issue that maybe I should reflect is with regards to the way we share our innovations at the Water Research Commission so we will post it in the Knowledge Hub we will market it through our social media and so forth but what I liked about the social innovation um fact sheets of the Afri Alliance team is then you have a multiply effect by working with the other partners in Afri Alliance we also get to reflect this thing in the Afri Alliance website so we're reaching out to more people that knew who to have if we just using the WRC networks and platforms and maybe lastly to say that I think the fact that we used the social innovation fact sheet for water monitoring for our MOOC was a brilliant one because with that we're not only having a one way of sharing this social innovation that we have identified as team Afri Alliance but we provided a platform for an interactive session with the beneficiaries or the people that can learn even how you apply or you start thinking about this kind of dimension so when you develop social innovation so I think it was a brilliant one it provided an interactive thing between us the Afri Alliance team and our stakeholders but also further provided some skills and sort of training on those social innovation facts so it wasn't just a paper that shows that people were able to now understand it better and I think from the Water Research Commission those are the key things that we have learned and we're going to use it in going forward with our social innovations as we market them as we make sure that people are aware and promoting uptake and use of those social innovations so I think it was a job well done by the team Afri Alliance and a lot of learning from us as the Water Research Commission and I think I'm speaking on behalf of all the Afri Alliance partners that the way we handle the social innovation fact sheets it was a very innovative way and very effective and efficient way of promoting social innovations thank you very much. Thank you very much for those reflections, number loading and really alluding to us the very different ways enrich the social innovation fact sheets have benefited the project and are also able to really permeate our insights through their respective partners networks. So I will now hand back to David Smith from WENB this time to talk us through the demand driven action groups that Afri Alliance had set up. Yes thank you Euta and so exactly that demand driven innovation action groups, action groups in this sense are communities of practice demand driven because they've come from a bottom up process so each one of these 10 action groups that we set up across Africa were given the opportunity to identify local problems and to solve those with local solutions whilst involving not only entities from that area but also international both Africa and European. So each one of these action groups were completely open and free to decide how to go about doing their activities and were able to bounce their ideas off us as an Afri Alliance consortium in terms of how they were moving things forward. There was a question actually posed by Zenebe in the chat and I think this works very well with what the actual action groups were looking to achieve where you have actually mentioned that there needs to have greater collaboration happening at an African level and this is obviously looking at climate change adaptations etc and that's exactly what the action groups were all about. The idea of collaborating working together from different African organizations, institutions and indeed local entities that were bringing together the expertise or the problems that they faced at that local level and overcoming them together so it was really this collaborative idea that was brought forward through these action groups. You mentioned that at the end of that question the idea of capacity building and the fact that it's another issue that needs to be brought forward and indeed this was one of quite potentially the more important focus areas of a lot of these action groups is that not only were innovative activities taking place at each of these action groups but indeed the capacity development was also some of the core activities that they were looking at so I'll invite yourselves Zenebe and all the others that have interest to have a look at the AFRI Alliance website to go into the demand-driven action groups and you can see exactly what type of activities each one of these have managed to do, how they've collaborated together and what are some of the problems they've managed to solve so thank you back to you. Great and also we will have more detail about them in webinar three of this series. Another aspect that AFRI Alliance had been trying to do was to strengthen the monitoring and forecasting capacity in order to help African stakeholders to deal with climate change. Here I would like to hand over to Chris Mannens from ITC to talk us through the AFRI Alliance approaches to this. Thank you Uta and we all in AFRI Alliance we also engaged in strengthening monitoring and forecasting capacity for water and climate and also the processes in Africa so this to support in fact African and European water professionals and also the public in general in collecting and finding and analyzing information on water and climate for their particular or special region of interest or also the whole continent. With our African partners we developed three solutions to support the collection and analysis of these water and climate data and information. First we developed what you can see AFRI Alliance geodata an open geodata web portal that contains information on water and climate data sources available for the continent. This open web portal permits you to browse and to find the metadata which are descriptive data and spatial information on water and climate across Africa so what do these data mean and where you can get them from which data web pages for example you can obtain and download them. In second we developed a triple sensor approach for collocated analysis of multiple and independent data sources and how to compare them. A triple sensing is about getting and comparing three independent water or climate information sources for example rainfall and finding the most reliable one for your geographic location of interest. So in AFRI Alliance for example we combined for example which is not done usually combined conventional meteorological station data with satellite sensors and for example also citizen and crowdsourced data. For example you can play the online demo we made and developed a toolbox in an online demo so you can play the online demo on how citizens for example perform versus conventional rainfall stations and satellites in Burkino-Faso for example here you have also the web access the web access so you can browse that active demo to see how the triple sensor approach works. You can also download for example if you have some more GIS experience the triple sensor demo toolbox from the AFRI Alliance of our website. As a third tool we developed the AFRI Alliance data collection handbook. The AFRI Alliance data collection handbook contains guidelines on how to set up and design in fact a water point monitoring system in your area or region of interest. It focuses thereby on crowd or citizen-based data collection efforts. Specific webinars on all three tools we developed or decisions we developed are available in one of the next webinars of AFRI Alliance. Thank you. Thank you very much Chris and indeed this is also a big piece of work which is why we've dedicated two further webinars to this and let me also take this opportunity to say there are several webinars that we're repeating in French to make all our work more accessible to French speakers in African countries including this initial webinar which will be held again this afternoon in French. We've also realized we need to bring people together in innovative ways and we have set up a whole two series of knowledge brokerage events and with us today Jean-Marie Kilesche from Waternet and Taryn Creil from Eclai Africa to discuss what these events were and how useful they were for example from Eclai's perspective. Over to you Jean-Marie first. Thank you very much Wuta and indeed for those who have been following us from the beginning one of the key objectives of AFRI Alliance was to create that bridge and that could not be possible or we felt as part of the AFRI Alliance project that it was critical to enhance or facilitate the knowledge sharing both on the online but also offline environment for all the stakeholders from Africa and Europe operating in the climate and water environments and as part of this project as Wuta just mentioned we had two sets of knowledge brokerage events the first one which was regional in nature we refer to it as the innovation bridge event it was designed to serve as a platform where we could match needs from universities, council, companies in terms of social innovation when it comes to climate change with potential collaborators, funders, investors with the overall purpose of seeing the potential for commercialization but also just to make aware people what are some of the innovation that are existing in that space and ultimately possibly to you know to be able to foster the upscaling of some of those and the innovation bridge event were also designed as platforms where exhibition and demonstration of some of the innovation from Africa or from Europe could be made public first of all from what was coming out of AFRI Alliance from the various technical arm but also from the local innovators who were existing but not always known across across board the second type of knowledge brokerage event that we had were more localized and we refer to them as roadshows they were targeting more small to medium enterprises with their innovations and it provides a more localized opportunity for networking and over the past few years we've had a number of such knowledge brokerage events for innovation bridge events were implemented I'm not going to go to in details for all of them but what I would like you to appreciate is the fact that like in terms of our innovation bridge event some of the key consideration that we consider we had was to do with the geographical spread as a result we had an innovation bridge event in Botswana not only in terms of geographical spread but also in terms of the content so for instance our IBEs were in places like Botswana in Cape Town in Marrakesh, Morocco but also in Uganda and what I would like also to share with you is probably also the approach because on one hand we wanted some events that we convene herself as AFRI Alliance but in other cases we're actually joining some of the existing events so that we actually speak to some of the existing stakeholder attending those events as a result one of the IBE was part of the Africa Utility Week or the Inbo World General Assembly or even more recently the Alpha Congress that took place in Kampala it was literally the same approach that we had in terms of the road shows and for the road shows we had an opportunity to cover also region like West Africa where we had the opportunity to run these collaborative brokerage knowledge events in places like Accra, Wagadugu of course we came back again to Zambia and Central Africa was not left out we had Iawende in Cameroon that was also also to one of the knowledge brokerage event so we in fact had that opportunity to make sure that some of the innovation that's were actually coming out of the local apps were given that opportunity to be shared with potential funders and donors for upscaling so UTA I think this is what I wanted to share in terms of the knowledge brokerage event and I would want also just to invite all the participants this afternoon to register for the fifth Africa Alliance Innovation Bridge event which is scheduled to take place as part of the Waternet online symposium and it will be on the 29th of October 2020 and everybody is encouraged to join and to have a sense of what this kind of knowledge bridge event have been over the past years thank you. Thank you Jean-Marie and indeed it's good to point out that the the last Africa Alliance Innovation Bridge event is just coming up people can so join and get a get a taste of what these events are like it's also a good opportunity because as you see from the photos we were blessed within the first years of the project to be able to hold these events exactly as designed namely face-to-face given the situation that we have all lived through in the last six months that seems like a luxury position and to be able to gather many people in rooms we're no longer easily able to do that so we're now transitioning to an online version of the Innovation Bridge event and I would now like to invite Taryn Quayle from ICLEI to share with us her reflections on the on the nature of these events and what it's meant for ICLEI Africa. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen and thank you Uta and Jean-Marie and as Uta mentioned I am from ICLEI Africa for those not familiar with ICLEI we're a network of cities and local governments that are supporting a movement towards sustainable development so our audience therefore is very focused on decision makers both technical and political and making key links to national regional and international processes and institutions so throughout the AFRI Alliance project ICLEI has both hosted and participated in a number of Innovation Bridge events and road shows and we'd just like to take the opportunity to share two of the the critical lessons from our engagements in the Knowledge Brokerage initiatives that we've learned and so for us one of the first is and again this goes back to what Uta was saying about you know in the days when we could meet face to face but one of the immediate lessons from the brokerage events was actually the structure that was adopted so often we have in our traditional modes of engagement we have a presentation and the delegates sit in the audience and there's very limited engagement in those formal sessions between the audience and the presenters and what the structure of the AFRI Alliance Knowledge Brokerage events allowed for was to actually adopt a speed dating approach which allows delegates to move between different stations and visit and speak to different innovators following their pitch which means they can engage with them directly and adopting this process we really saw dynamic engagement between delegates we saw tangible synergies coming out in terms of identifying respective institutions needs solutions and how they can form corporations and and engagements moving forward and the other thing we noticed about this this format was that it was scalable and it was easy to replicate across regions between themes and across audiences and that's the most important is that we need to have this co-production this safe space where different audiences can meet and to engage on on the critical topics that we're discussing the second aspect of the Knowledge Brokerage events was actually the panel discussions and this presented an opportunity for a focus dialogue both on social innovation but also how that relates to policy and of course from Ikle's point of view and policy is one of our critical areas of focus so this was of great interest to us and we saw that you know while Africa is a home and it's got a wealth of innovation which was clearly showcased in these events it's not often seen at that scale so this was a great opportunity to really see all of the innovation that is mainstream or is available within Africa but that we see is not strongly mainstreamed and is often even underrepresented in policy when we talk about policy we don't often talk about innovation and so if we're going to support innovation to scale we need to increasingly strengthen this link and identify opportunities such as knowledge brokerage events that can really connect decision makers with multidisciplinary stakeholders and to discuss how very importantly how this innovation can be mainstreamed into policy and to then focus on how we can get this to scale and how these climate and water innovations can get to market as critical next steps and we saw the the start of some of these dialogues and some of these recommendations that came out through these panel discussions that really highlighted the need for increasing the focus regionally and globally on these local but also regional knowledge brokerage events that can really then be upscaled from the local level into regional and international processes as key recommendations going forward. Thank you. Thank you so much Terin. Thank you also Jean-Marie. I think together people have been able to get a first taste of what the AfroLines knowledge brokerage events were about and we have here an appeal for you to register at the final conference which is coming up where we have a number of sessions the Waternet Symposium as Jean-Marie mentioned is being held online this year and AfroLines has its entire track for its final conference within the symposium including the Innovation Bridge events but also the stakeholder map validation event that David already mentioned and we have two more sessions focused on the various ways in which AfroLines has helped to bridge needs and solutions and also we have a session where we'd like to explore with with you and other stakeholders how we can further enhance engagement and cooperation beyond the AfroLines network and lifetime. I'm formally handing back to myself because I'd like to briefly showcase how we have also tried to foster knowledge sharing in the online environment particularly we have set up a rather elaborate online portal with quite a number of dedicated hubs one of them being the Knowledge Hub where with no less than 12 categories where amongst other things you can find the entry to the stakeholder map also to more than a hundred ideas that stakeholders have shared with us in our exploration of needs and solutions. We have a blog, job opportunities, funding opportunities, so many very relevant items for various different AfroLines stakeholder groups. Importantly we also feature an events platform where we feature our own events but also many many other events that are taking space in this field of water and climate increasing of course these are no longer face to face events so we're featuring a lot of the webinars that are going on and if your event is relevant to the field of water and climate particularly for African stakeholders then please do submit your event and we will happily feature and promote it via our communications channels. The portal also serves as an entry point to a number of the outputs that have already been mentioned such as the AfroLines Geodata portal the social innovation fact sheets you can explore the work of the action groups and you can find our policy briefs that we have generated. Another way in which we have strengthened knowledge sharing collaboration online is through two dedicated MOOCs which we've made highly interactive the first one was focused on water and climate change in Africa and was run in 2019 the second one went earlier during the European summer focused on the topic of social innovation in water and climate change in Africa and the content was provided jointly by the African partners and we over a very innovative component was also the use of the forum in both MOOCs we had 600 and 850 participants respectively that's a large number of participants who were not just learning on their own but the forum really provided room for interaction and discussion and exchange and networking so further enhancing the collaboration amongst these stakeholders. This has been a quick tour of some of the the key activities that AfroLines has engaged in it's now time to turn to the questions that you might have and I invite the AfroLines partners also to share their video and join the discussion here so we can see what questions have come up I saw also a question earlier coming up in French so I'd like to repeat that we have this webinar of AfroLines in a nutshell later on this afternoon at four o'clock Paris Amsterdam time the first question David you already took to and then there is another question from Sunneva how do we integrate meteorological forecasting techniques with indigenous forecasting techniques so as so as to build robust forecasting system in Africa Chris perhaps you would like to reflect on this I think you partly alluded already the the usefulness of the triple sensor approach in this respect. Yeah if I if I was reading also the the questions are with quite a bit a lot of interest so I think indeed a triple sensor approach like a triple collocation method could indeed be here a method to you could look into that to how to integrate indeed local forecasting knowledge like Sunneva is mentioning with indeed each large regional or global modeling forecasting data so that that could be done using that approach we developed in AfroLines and perhaps there will be more information coming up in the in the dedicated webinars that you have coming up in November December. Yeah I will take it surely on board this point is interesting yeah. Okay then I'm going to draw on my French speaking colleagues from AfroLines to see what the precise content of the questions posed in French is I'm not going to try and pretend that I can make a full interpretation so perhaps Natasha, Jean-Marie, Chris you would like to come in here and help. Natasha speaking I can try to switch on my camera yeah so as you've mentioned Uta we can probably get more into the topic during the next webinar but as far as I understand the question it's about how depending on the climate condition our AfroLines approach and tool still efficient for a tropical region so my my first highlight to answer that that question asked by Benjamin thank you for the question is that as has been explained the approach is mainly demand-driven with a tropical approach so along the process we really try to tackle the local needs that we have identified to different events that has been presented during this webinar and the approach in terms of social innovation fact sheet in terms of the hubs which bring together the needs of the solution are really something that can be applied no regards to the climate that are additive to the different type of climate so we we have developed some transversal in terms of climate approach and I think really part of the the answer is really the common ground of all our activities were demand-driven and based on the perception both from our partners as well from from Africa and as well from all the people that we have met along the last during the last four years I don't know if my other French speaker colleagues would like to to complete maybe my my answer I think it was a comprehensive answer I would also like to highlight that we have 16 partner organizations in AfroLines so more than the speakers there are far more of our partners present luckily in this webinar I'd like to also invite those partners to take the floor to further elaborate on on aspects of what they are for Alliance activities how they have related to your respective organizations missions how you've experienced the collaboration the projects etc so if you have reflections to share please feel very welcome to take the floor and I think we also have more questions coming up question about the action group how can we part of AfroLines since you're working as a regional centre for capacity building research in water harvesting in Sudan and David would you like to point out how to join action groups the future of the action groups etc yeah perfect thank you for that question very pertinent and given that obviously one of the action groups is focused specifically on those activities and indeed this is one of our main aims of the action groups is to identify exactly who and which action groups would like to continue with their activities and in so doing we are holding a session within the the final Afro Alliance conference at the Waternet conference and I think Tandai has actually shared a link to that with you in in the chat and so by all means register there and and of course as it's on online you'll be able to join us and you can then see exactly how with the with regards to the action groups we can we can try and bring you together with the with those action groups that are currently undertaking their activities and to see how they are looking to take their activities forward and how you can join in with those activities that they're doing so if you join us there we can we can definitely help to to engage you with with the action groups excellent another question pertains to where AfroLines is busy as AfroLines is the network active in all countries in Africa yes as audacious as it may seem in principle we're trying to cover no less than the entire African continent having said that you heard that we have what we call lighthouse initiatives so we've set up a series of Rocho events of innovation bridge events we had a set of 10 action groups we can't work in every single country in the same way but we try to set our events up such that we have regional scope regional coverage in our events and so we try to be embracing for all countries as much as we can and we are also four and a half years into a five-year project so what we've done is try to test try and test and validate ways of bringing stakeholders from from different regions from from different stakeholder types etc together in new ways and we hope that these ways of working can be taken up and of course at the benefit of the benefit of all countries in Africa but that will involve an uptake and that's way beyond what we can achieve as a network of 16 partner organizations what we're hoping to make these approaches available and share our experience such as in the webinar here so that others can learn and take this forward and find this useful then we have a question regarding to climate change from Jerome climate change is expanded over time in nature so why we work on adaptation rather than reducing or mitigation I think we have some experts or whose expertise is closer to answering this question and then perhaps my own I'm thinking of perhaps Chris that you might be interested to answer this question or some of the upper lines partners who haven't so far taken the floor yeah good I was a short intervention because with all the two of course that's of course a very the question which is always asked we all there's much talk this is the last last 10 years on adaptation trying to cope with climate change and isn't there a way to try to reduce this global warming or increasing CO2 levels carbon dioxide levels so that's indeed true but that's I think there are also many efforts on the way let's say in the world to so to speak to try to reduce of course the emissions greenhouse gas emissions and try to reduce try to work on from that side to climate change but on the in the day-to-day practice it's entirely needed to try to adapt to prepare yourself to changing climate conditions I think so that's the I think both today and in the international sphere that they work on both on both roads adaptation and reduction but I think for Africa they propose more on adaptation yeah and I think we also see this back in our work of the analysis of what the societal challenges are and we saw this intertwined nature of balancing water security food security and energy security and they of course have implications for both mitigation and adaptation as well so yes it's I don't think we can focus just on one I don't think the fact that we are we are doing that either in the work of Afro Alliance but overall we also have a perspective also future perspective how we can prepare African stakeholders for the future impacts and of course it would be great to reduce those further through a mitigation approach but at the same time we also have to be realistic to understand just how hard it is to to turn the current climate change impacts around in a measurable way there are no open questions at this moment so I would like to offer the floor once again to any of the partners who would like to contribute and share further reflections before we round off the seminar webinar any of the partners hello do you hear me yes hello everybody this is a very interesting webinar and I'm very glad to be here what I want to just highlight is right now we are implementing the platform of knowledge management in Enbo for the whole continent and and we start some discussion with Chris to work with him and and I wanted really to emphasize to this point because this is a very important point to our strategy and to the work that we're doing for all our members in Africa and we have a lot of information about data and all those information so that I will I what I wanted to do with Chris even though I will translate in French but bring also one of our partner to talk about it and or our or we just inform you about this platform and what is the objective and what we're doing and what we what we plan to accomplish to this this coming year because it is very important for us to just share with all the partner here that we are having this platform and Chris have done a very an outstanding job for this dual portal and we want to learn more about what what what he's done and how we can just capture some some information from him so this is something that I really want to to share with you and I don't forget one promise that I have done which is bring the executive secretary of the world water forum to to to have a webinar with you guys because it is the since we are we disseminate the maximum that you can do all the information from Africa and create a bridge and right now they're stopping since we have since the covid pandemic they cannot just have a new schedule to have the the the precise date of the next water forum but right now we're waiting any moment to them to give us the right information so that we can just plan to do some activity with them because since they didn't have the they didn't have the visibility he didn't want to engage himself to do it right after so as soon as I have the information I will bring it to the platform so that we can organize maybe a tenth or eleventh webinar the eleventh maybe I don't know so we can do it together I want just to share with you with you thank you so much thank you Taryn you also wanted to come in please yes please um yeah I would just like to to share with participants just to note again that while Ute mentioned you know it's a four and a half year project which is on its fifth year and fast approaching we do have the sustainability element in the Afri Alliance online platform so that is through the website and I mean Ute showcased some of the materials there but there's also the the community which you can join and and you can then you know build dialogues and actively engage with the network and then my second point is that the the premise of Afri Alliance is really in the word alliance and the idea behind the project was that it was an initiative which was a network of networks and to try and address some of the gaps between organizations that are in tandem working on water and climate issues so I would really encourage the participants who who have further interest to look at joining the the community online and also you know looking into the the network itself that formulates Afri Alliance and the various partners involved because we are all coming from a different viewpoint serving different stakeholders focusing on different themes whether it be research cities SMEs and there's there's further opportunities to connect with both the Afri Alliance project and with the partners that formulate that network so really encourage the the delegates to look into that if they have further interest excellent very well put and with that I would like to start wrapping up by pointing out the additional webinars I've mentioned this afternoon we will repeat this webinar but then in French on the 21st of October we have webinar number three on how to create sustainable action groups on the 4th of November we will take you in detail through the Afri Alliance needs and solutions hub and on the 26th of November we have an English and French version respectively of the Afri Alliance triple sensor approach and then on the 1st and 3rd of December we look into detail of the geodata portal and other Afri Alliance databases and we round off this webinar series with the data journey approach to development programs you can register for the webinars using the the link below or simply going to the Afri Alliance website and searching for webinars there so thank you very much for joining us this afternoon I hope you have enjoyed learning a bit more about Afri Alliance and indeed please feel very warmly invited to join our network to join our work to join this community so that we can jointly take this work forward and help strengthen the ability of African stakeholders to face climate change impacts um in 2021 and beyond thank you very much goodbye