 Welcome everybody to this third webinar in the webinar series from AFRI Alliance. We have a number of speakers with us today and I'll run through exactly who those are. But yeah, just to let you know that this webinar is on how to create sustainable communities of practice or as we've called them in AFRI Alliance action groups in Africa on water and climate activities. My name is David Smith and I'll be running through this webinar with you. I'm from the consulting company WIMB and I'm joined by my colleague Mathias Bruma, also from WIMB, and Luke Sandoval from Maya G Delft and Mark Graham from Ground Truth in South Africa, who is leading the Ubuntu action group. He's with a few colleagues of his who will tell us a little bit more about the action groups, how they are run on the ground. So to give you a bit of an outline of the agenda that we'll be running through today, I'll give you a brief overview of the AFRI Alliance action groups, how they were set up, why they were set up and how they've been running up to this point. My colleague Mathias will run through some of the sustainability criteria that we've come out with following a few sessions with the action groups and other stakeholders across Africa to have an idea of what can constitute a sustainable action group. Luke will be doing much the same idea but the insights that he will be giving us are from the AFRI Alliance MOOCs where we had a number of African practitioners participate and there again we asked the question what in fact can constitute a sustainable action group or indeed a community of practice. Mark will give us a good outline and a rundown of what are the sustainability experiences from the field in terms of the Ubuntu action group before we open up the forum for questions from all of you. But what I might suggest at this point is that in the chat you have the ability to ask a question and to raise a point of discussion or of debate, whatever you feel would be an interesting topic to discuss while we run through this entire presentation. So you can put that there in the chat and we can note those down and we run through those during the open forum session at the end. Alternatively we will be able to open your mics so that you can give us perhaps feedback from yourself in terms of your own experiences on action groups or communities of practice or any other question that you might have in relation to that. So we've opened that space about 25 minutes for that to happen. So just to give you a bit of a context around AFRI Alliance and some of the main or really the main objective that we had during this project. Obviously it's a project financed by the the European Commission under the Horizon 2020 banner with its main objective is to bring together African and European stakeholders in the areas of water innovation, climate research, policy and capacity development and basically that is really trying to look to strengthen the preparedness of Africa in the face of the climate change vulnerabilities that it's currently facing. In order to do this AFRI Alliance is really considered the network of networks because we brought together a number of African and European networks that are involved in water and climate activities. So as you can see we've covered the entire African continent through connecting these different networks on water and climate activities and from the European side we've done much the same thing with the number of different networks and associations that are bringing together many practitioners across the European continent as well as specialized research centers and consultancies such as ourselves at focus on specific aspects where we can bring our expertise into this project. When we look at the the idea of action groups and communities of practice we had this initial concept of being demand driven bottom-up focused but if we have a bit of a concept of what is an action group or what is a community of practice as such really it's just a group of people that are coming together that have a common concern or a common focus over a particular aspect and the way to solve that particular aspect is to collaborate together in order to solve that particular issue. There are three main characteristics of an action group or a community of practice. Basically the sense is that the members are able to interact together that they form relationships and a culture within that action group itself. The whole purpose of it is to build those relationships and enable them to work on specific areas of interest and basically the final point is to look to continually develop this community where members are able to produce results by coming together and whether these are new procedures techniques success stories different types of tools pilot projects that sort of thing and Mark will be able to run through these these aspects and tell us a little bit about their own personal experience as he comes in towards the end of this this webinar. From the Afri Alliance point of view we we created 10 action groups across the African continent and these were set up in two lots the first lot was set up in 2016 of five and that was followed in 2018 by the second lot of five action groups and as I mentioned they were bottom up and demand driven so they were completely open to decide on which activities they wanted to focus as long as it was settled within certain themes that that from from current studies current literature and current concerns at the African and European level we we detailed what were those particular themes to focus on where it was on coastal regions urban areas rivers wetlands that sort of thing and so you can see here from the range of action groups that that came forward there's all sorts of different aspects that we're being focused on or currently being worked on we have from water harvesting potential to drought mitigation to water stewardship and indeed the Ubuntu action group on the citizen based water quality monitoring which Mark will be able to run through a little bit later on. As I mentioned we were we'd set up these 10 action groups they had the focus of not only looking at these particular themes and coming up with certain local problems that they wanted to solve with local solutions but they they had one other aspect that they needed to attend to and that was that the problems were not only local but they could have an international flavor to them in that sense and to look at other neighboring countries that might be suffering with the same aspect and to bring that together and share those results and those experiences across borders and indeed not only from an African point of view but also from a European point of view where there are a lot of these similar experiences and a lot of these similar problems have also been faced so as you can see we have action groups that are set up from the north west east central and southern Africa where I think it was really important to have an idea we have 10 action groups that are working on particular local problems and to have an idea of exactly what they were working on was really quite important and one of those ways of doing that was to ensure that there was a form of reporting in a very simplified manner and this is done through the AFRI Alliance online portal through the reporting platform called really simple reporting that was set up by AFRI and and basically what it allows is for each action group to quickly detail exactly what they've been doing and how they've been solving their problems and what's over some of the objectives that they've managed to achieve and the impacts that they've created at that level and in such we've managed to have real insight from these 10 action groups from across the different parts of Africa on exactly what they have been doing at those local levels and as you can see from these reports here that it was bringing together a number of different actors across different scales in order to either implement different water quality monitoring type of aspects to have a look at what are the different types of agricultural responses that can be done at a local level and to various other different aspects that can be taken into into account but one of the more important aspects with regards to an action group wasn't so much how they were set up what they were doing in terms of running and how they were being able to do their activities and report on those but was to have an understanding of how they could potentially remain sustainable after the funding from AFRI Alliance was finished so we ended to go a few studies and Matthias is going to run through those with you now just to give us an idea of how these action groups could potentially remain sustainable so over to you Matthias thank you David for a very nice introduction to the action groups and well hello again as well from my side I'm happy to present you shortly what we have done in AFRI Alliance through a collaborative approach to foster the sustainability of the action groups and so as you may know it's important to that doing but as well at the end of a project efforts are made to ensure the sustainability of action groups and with that objective in mind during the project we have undertaken two main activities at one side we have done World Café with participants of the AFRI Congress held in Uganda this past February before all the craziness started and we did as well in a collaborative approach the co-development of business model for the action groups but what did we address doing those doing the World Café we addressed four main points first the factors to facilitate the set up of action groups then the success factors of the action groups but also the challenges of that monitoring and performance can have and finally the long-term sustainability of those I could talk to you about many points that came out during the World Café on each of those specific topics but I'd like to highlight only a few when setting up an action group key organizational and economic facilitators are those that obviously contribute to the self-sustainability of those action groups and that in fact relates and aligns very good with the success factor of an action group including having a clear leadership face-to-face interaction at the beginning to create good bonds and connections between the members a clear governance structure, accountability and clear funding mechanisms but it's not only that but to first innovation in the it's important to understand and target the local needs and translate them into sectoral gains and giving space to that for failure and of course involving local actors. Remarkable is also that indicators and monitoring is not it's not so easy as sometimes thought so and it's important to have it clear at the beginning of an action group and as we're doing the development of activities to know what, when and how to monitor and evaluate. Finally to achieve the long-term sustainability and we develop a business model and identify the leaderships of the activities that could take place after the end of the project. So we did exactly that know how can action groups become sustainable after the project life them. At first we said the first step was to assess if action groups actually want to continue their collaboration and if so if they still work to do regarding the purpose they came together for so if there's nothing to be researched or done for on the purpose they came for there's no need to for them to stay together and if the but if that interest this interest persists on once the project is coming to its end between its members and it's important to create stronger bonds and alliances between those members to see how to face the future challenges. Our second step is was to co-design and develop a business model for the action groups and to identify a clear leadership within the FBI Alliance who would be willing to contribute to guide the action groups once they are at the end of the of the project. And within those business models we included aspects of of of short descriptions of the action groups the social impact that they can generate but as well financial requirements and income streams that that are important for could be important for the action groups as well as the partners that that they could come together with or other market other action groups that could have a similar niche within the market. I showed I hope that that brief overview has helped you and if not I'm happy to answer your questions later in in in the chat. I'll hand over now to Luke who will present you briefly the outcomes of the MOOC regarding the sustainability of the action groups. Thank you Matias. Thanks very much for for running us through that. So Matias just run us through some of the some of the sustainability criteria that was identified during some of the other activities relating to the action groups and I'm about to go through some of the some of the some of the findings that we got from our previous MOOC, our massive open online course. So previously earlier in the year we held the MOOC titled social innovation in water and climate change in Africa and so this MOOC gave us a lot of insight into the the different action groups particularly relating to the sustainability of the action groups as we had over over 850 participants in this MOOC and many of the participants were based in Africa and they were practitioners or policymakers and researchers so we really managed to to get a very deep pool of knowledge relating to water and climate challenges and related this knowledge to action groups. So one of the modules of the MOOC was was specifically focusing on action groups and one of the best ways to get get insights from our participants was through the interactive discussion forum that we held in each module so we drill down into the into the action into the discussion forum of the of this module of the action group module to see what our participants thought about sustainability relating to action groups. So firstly we can see that the community involvement and and building broad consensus amongst a range of organizations was really a key a key factor in the sustainability of action groups according to our participants. They suggested that not just consensus was needed but involvement of a broad range of actors from early stage in the action group process during the co-design and defining objectives was a key a key point here. Further than that we can see that the learning process in capacity building is also formed to key point of action group sustainability according to our our participants. The need to learn from failure and the space to fail and and learn from that was was raised many times by our participants as well as the implementation of continuous and ongoing training capacity building for local stakeholders and people involved in our action groups. Additionally monitoring and evaluation was the key point that was raised particularly ongoing and long-term monitoring in order to to observe the effect of the action group and to measure the objectives up against the progress that was being made. And finally our participants suggested that communication was a key point relating to the sustainability of action groups in particular long-term the ability to create long-term communication plans and to use this communication to secure long-term funding and the overall sustainability of the action group. So besides the the discussion forums that I previously mentioned in our MOOC we also offered participants the opportunity to create their own case studies and they could create their own case studies on anything relating to social innovation, water and climate change. And many of our participants related their case studies specifically to action groups and action group mortality previously learned from. And many of these case studies are available now on the F3 Alliance website. We're uploading them every week and this week is the final week the final group of case studies that we're uploading and so in total we have over 30 case studies from our participants and they're incredibly high quality publications. I think if you go onto the website you can take a look and there's a lot of information to choose from there. But I would just like to highlight one that we uploaded last week that was although it wasn't focused in Africa it gave a really great example of the creation and establishment of an action group this time in Colombia and also touched upon key points of sustainability within action groups. So again this is on the F3 Alliance website and you can find all of the case studies that we uploaded there. So thank you very much. I'll just hand it to Mark now. Well greetings from Africa and in the room with me are like some of my colleagues and online hopefully some other of our delegates who've attended some of the course that we worked with here. And we can't see the full list but hopefully when we get to the open question and answer session we might have some more engagement there but we're looking forward to reporting back to you on just some of our experiences in the context of the Ubuntu action group under this project. So good afternoon to you all from Southern Africa. So my name is Mark Graham. There's a bunch of us involved in this project. Jim Taylor is sitting on my left here. Stephen Ellery across the way from me. Ayanne Lepiano is hopefully online. Charlene and various others. Thanks. And really what this sort of community of practice focused on was a number of key dimensions. One principle was a fresh workshop. This works spun out of the earlier process which was related to the african freshwater alliance for streams and so on. And we were looking there principally at developing and highlighting some of the citizen science tools that could be used by communities of practice in the monitoring and assessment and measuring of water resources at a local level. So very much a community citizen science focus. And the key part of that training workshop which we'll talk to just now and show some of that output was the development of each of the delegates at the end of it had to have worked after the four days I think it was a change project that they anticipated taking home with them and applying in their local context where they could actually start some of this monitoring and so on. And we're going to highlight two of those. Stephen is going to talk to that one from the western Cape down south of us here in South Africa and another one Lake Wilkworth up in Tanzania and Stephen will talk to those. We'll also then highlight in this through this community of practice the development of a number of case studies where some of this work has been able to be continued and into a wider network educational for sustainable development and the expert training course that's merged out of that and also a more recent project the C40s project which is the climate finance facility and their interest in trying to develop some material there that would be useful in the climate change perspective in Africa. So we'll talk to that. So thanks Luke next slide. So this group you'll see some of those shiny faces just now that's Africa there. We had a number of colleagues from all over Africa, Mauritius, Madagascar, Tanzania, the suit to several from South Africa and even a colleague out of Italy. So a nice wide distribution European and African delegates on that and we had this regional training workshop. Thanks Luke. That workshop was held here in South Africa and what we really were fascinated by was this concept of the SDGs and how could we take this new paradigm the SDGs and integrate the this SDG thinking into the tools and we were particularly interested in to the SDG number six keen water and sanitation and how could we measure how could we evaluate how could we engage with this as a community of practice. 63.2 is talking about monitoring of water resources and these citizen science tools clearly were entirely appropriate there as monitoring tools. Thanks and we'll see some of those in actions. Thanks Luke. So this is just some photographs and pictures from that fresh two training workshop very much are coming together of different individuals from different member states around Africa and very much a sharing of ideas and experiences with their own citizen science and water quality monitoring and the introduction to a toolbox of different tools that we've been to co-develop in with a number of partners over many years and sharing those tools and how we could use those for water quality monitoring. You see some of the individuals in the last three photographs there presenting their change projects and what they anticipated being able to do and show with with some of that and I'm going to ask Stephen thanks Luke to talk to some of that and give us some feedback on those change projects. Great thank you so this is just a photo of all the delegates who made it to the fresh two workshop yeah I think that's quite a wonderful summary photo of the diversity of ages and backgrounds of the people who came to the fresh two workshop. Luke if you could go to the next slide that would be great. So the first change project that we would really like to share with you guys is the Western Cape Change project which was run by actually one of the government institutions down in Cape Town and it was run in the Berg River catchment which is a really important water supply catchment for the city of Cape Town and the the project end at kind of empowering the six primary schools and three high schools with the citizen science tools and those citizen science tools that we used were the clarity tube that you can see pretty tough on the top right and then mini SAS and also the velocity planks and they chose five different water quality monitoring locations and each school is responsible for monitoring the water quality on a quarterly basis in those areas yeah and then they report back to a centralized the Frontier Conservation Trust and they report back their results to them and then Frontier Conservation Trust will then link that information to other people who need. Luke if you could go to the next slide please great and so then the Lake Rukua Change project is based up in Tanzania and this was a partnership between the Lake Rukua Water Board and in six secondary schools in the area and these and so they provided citizen science training to the schools and to the Lake Rukua Basin Water Board and they have now set up six different water quality monitoring sites on inflowing rivers and streams into the Lake Rukua itself and so yeah those are some really cool and exciting change projects that came out of the afresh workshop. I'm now going to hand over to Jim Taylor who will talk to us about the lessons learned and where we are going from here. Thanks for the next slide. Greetings everybody and my name is Jim and I'd be to be with you this afternoon and thanks for all the really helpful introductions David, Luke and Matthias. So my colleagues Mark and Stephen have overviewed the fresh workshop and what we now are trying to do is say what have we learned from all this work? We've learned to build on existing networks rather than create brand new ones. Action learning has been a key component of this as well as co-engage action working with people and developing ownership by working together rather than sending messages to people and we're finding I'm hoping that our colleague Ayanda Lepiana is online with us and may tip in a bit later but he and I are finding that indigenous knowledge processes are really helpful in building understanding. Thanks Luke. So we've been invited by Ete Gweni which is the greater area of Durban hopefully you've heard of Durban one of South Africa's biggest cities. They're doing a C40 project which stands for sustainable cities and integrating socio-ecological learning using the toolbox that Mark referred to and you can see in the toolbox there's MiniSAS, the Stream Assessment Scoring System, using biomonitoring and in that little chart at the bottom you can see the many different parts of South Africa where MiniSAS tests have been done and put on the Google Earth plane. Thanks Luke. So Ayanda's been leading a process of training and viral tramps who are public-spirited community members in one of the catchments near Durban where Paul meets and because of COVID they weren't able to meet. Most participants don't have laptops and Ayanda was able to develop a system of learning using WhatsApp chat simply with mobile phone technology and local area networks to do the teaching. What we found there is people soon became still bits sharing voice messages, text messages and participating. It would be quite exciting to see if Luke's MOOC could extend into a phone-driven MOOC. I don't know of any MOOCs globally that are driven on phones but it is possible and that could be an innovation that we develop for it here. So there you can see some of the people working in that catchment. We asked Ayanda to trip him later. I hope you're there Ayanda. Next slide please Luke. Perhaps I should have added most of the training is done in Isizulu, one of the more popular local languages of our area and there you can see it has a very much inquiry-based training. So a question-driven curriculum rather than a content-driven curriculum and it has a strong emphasis on question-guided learning. So the questions that the participants are asking become a feature of the learning together. Thanks Luke. These are just some images of the people working together. Those living in close proximity with each other were obviously conscious of social distancing but they then worked in pairs. As you can see, sharing their mobile phone technology, making notes and then sharing either text notes or voice notes with each other around the topics of the online learning. And enormous richness of sharing took place through the course. Thanks Luke. The group also did some practical work in a stream in the Palmyn catchment and you can see Ayanda in the middle of that picture there. And obviously people are wearing masks of we're living in COVID times but we're still able to get out to the stream and use the charity tubes to measure turbidity and of course to a mini SAS test there. Next please. So these are just the five T's of action learning. You put the topic of the learning in the middle and that bulls are the red dots in the middle. In this case it was learning about the Palmyn catchment. And then around that they're five T's, encouraging people to think about what's going on, talk about amongst each other, tuning in, connecting with the historical aspects of the catchment. How was it looked after in the past? How's it changed? What's going wrong? Of course the field work encounters is part of touching and then taking action as a strong component of this kind of action learning model. Thanks Luke. This is a strong slogan that comes from the apartheid era in South Africa. Either teach one, reach one or reach one, teach one. Really emphasizing if one has something to share, who and power can you share it with anyone? And this was a strong kind of collective slogan in the way that the training took place. So to spread the learning as much as possible especially for people who weren't connected through Wi-Fi and laptops and so on. Thank you. So we also made a range of indigenous language videos and video clips. Some of this work was supported by ExpertNet which is a global movement for education for sustainable development involving Mexico, India, Germany and ExpertNet is giving support to expertise around YouTube style video clips which can be produced in indigenous languages and can help us bridge to the STGs that Mark emphasized earlier. Thank you. So where do we go from here? Stephen recently ran a wetland assessment training program on that map on the left hand side of your screen of South Africa and we had participants from all over South Africa, 35 of them did this course and then they also met in collective clusters at local wetlands to situate the learning with practice. So we're going to continue with those trainings and then we're also relating to the United Nations University Regional Centers of Expertise and contributing to the citizen science agenda of RCEs globally. On the 30th of November we're going to have an open Zoom course inviting all the 180 RCEs from around the world to participate in sharing from the kinds of experiences we're having and contributing their own ideas as well. Thank you. This little map is a diagram of the whole world and those little crab archons represent outcomes of somebody who's done a mini SAS which is a stream assessment scoring system using indicator organisms or biomonitoring and you can see that it works just about anywhere where you have perennial rivers of streams from Canada in the north to Australia in the east of that map and you can see the little crabs occur on Madagascar and the Indian Ocean Islands states of Mauritius, Sandsipar as well as in India. So this kind of technology, this toolkit for measuring the river health index through indicator organisms is becoming more and more popular and the United Nations Committee responsible for SDG 6.3.2 are experimenting with using mini SAS as a global measure for all countries reporting into their SDG 6, which is the annual commitment each nation has. So really quite exciting development there. Thank you. Yeah, so more information we've put up some websites there. ExpertNet is another one that isn't mentioned there if people are interested in that. It's hosted by Engagement Global in Germany, but there we've got the Africa Lines, we've brought African freshwater, ground truth and so on and I don't know if you can do this Luke but we would really love to have Aayanda maybe say a few words. If you're online Aayanda we can't see the participants list from where we are. Aayanda is in the field at the moment and he may be able to contribute. Thank you everybody from our side for listening and let's see if we can have just a greeting to everybody from Aayanda and perhaps an emphasis. Thank you very much. Luke and David, done from our side. So we're up for questions and so on as they go. Thank you very much Mark and the rest for these very insightful messages. I was giving a little bit of space to see if Aayanda would like to mention something. I know that she should be able to unmute herself but in case there was the ability to do that. Good afternoon everyone. Ah okay here we go. Thank you everyone. Yes I'm Aayanda Lipiani, I'm working for ground truth. I'm working very close with Jim, Mark and Steve. Yes we have been doing some fantastic staff around the citizen science tools are engaging with the community members. The project is like it's mobilizing the local community members to understand and then address local issues such as sanitation, water leaks, illegal dam site and then some other pressing issues around the informal settlement and communities. Then the project has been sort of like driven most about the education for sustainable development competent like system thinking, anticipation, collaboration. Then during the like since the start of the COVID-19 we were planning to meet the people, the local community members face to face and running trainings so we couldn't manage to do that because of the regulation in South Africa so we're not allowed to meet people face to face. So we tried to use Zoom but there was no, people didn't have laptops and only centers like community centers with their wife are closed. So we tried to use WhatsApp which was sort of a success and during WhatsApp chat trainings we used indigenous knowledge because it was a powerful approach. For example like the people they were running training to them they got like their daily activities and we were using this, running this training with make sure that we link trainings around the citizen science tools with their daily activities so they can make a connection and we don't want people to come to the training and then they continue with their daily activities and then they're not making a connection. And also you use the 5T Action Learning, then the James Gettman talk about it. I think it went very well and we currently people are using the centers people are sort of summarizing the training in terms of like the appreciation approach what they learn and how we can improve the online trainings and also doing the some short videos in Isizulu and Isidosa. I think that's all from my side just to mention a few things that we've been doing. Very interesting Aayanda thank you so much for that intervention I think that supports very well what Jim was just presenting now as well about use of different languages etc in communicating those messages across so thank you for that. And so I think you've been active in the question so this is great this will give us a nice opening to this forum now we've got 10 minutes left so we'll run through and those questions and we'll see how best we can go through that. If indeed you have any other questions feel free to put them down here in the questions section or indeed raise your hand and we can go through those as well. The first one the first question we have from Tia Boertman where the question is regarding the sustainability of the action groups after the EU funding stops. Facilitation moderation of action group learning and exchanges what suggestions are there for that. Very good question thank you for that indeed this is a this is something that we we focused a lot on in terms of the this last couple of years where we had a look at what were the different options for action groups to to continue because we we do realize that an important aspect of an action group is indeed the the financing and the funding moving moving forward and there were a number of suggestions that have actually come out in order in order for that to to take place one of them was actually to and that was the concept from the very beginning was to bring action groups together with other larger programs projects that that they can align themselves with so we're making sure that the topics that they're focusing on can be aligned with other types of programs where there's a possibility for for funding to to be to be brought in in that sense. Also the other concept that we brought in with the action groups wasn't and the the idea of funding them completely for all of the activities the the idea indeed was just to have some seed funding so that it initiated the ideas initiated the the connections between these these different organizations and different countries and then that at least allowed the action groups to spur themselves on in order to to search for the other the other side of of funding that they might require in order to do all of their their activities and but as as an action group that is currently active that is coming to the end of its AFRI Alliance life and perhaps Mark you could give us another insight on how you as an action group looking to continue and and how the aspect related to financing and funding comes comes into play. Thanks thanks David it's a very good question and I think it's a perennial problem in this space but what we're seeing actually interestingly here that it literally came out of a meeting this morning was that the Development Bank of South Southern Africa the DBSA who are a major funder and they get a lot of European and overseas funding into development projects there's a stronger emphasis coming through there now on how how does this development funding what is the dimensionality to that funding that has to be showing that there is sustainability in the funding and in our particular project what's really exciting is that we now I think we've got some fantastic tools that have been developed the citizen science kind of tools which are able to illustrate the impacts of firstly the it might be you know physical impact from an intervention or structure a building a road a pipeline or something which might be impacting on rules and in our case that's our interest and so what I think is exciting in that space is that the funding requirements are now insisting on sustainability and how do you measure sustainability well the tools are able to articulate to that talk to it and I think the other dimension sustainability is clearly community involvement and so on so it's having developed a suite of tools that can allow for this work to take place and talk to funding mechanisms and this might be the longer term mechanisms through those through those processes of sustainability otherwise I think it really boils down to using this kind of funding to unlock further funding to continue this kind of work and it's been the nature of the work for the last half work for 20 years is that it's it's unlocking small pieces of the puzzle with small incremental budgets that allow bigger and bigger impacts and work to take place so it's all as I said it's a perennial problem I don't there's no easy long-term solution to the funding issue for this kind of work and supporting it but we just have to be creative about that and I think you know we're thankful for our fair alliance for allowing some of this process to continue. Yeah indeed I think as you mentioned Maka it's definitely an issue in the sector as a whole so not just something specifically related to to action groups as such and so we have another another question from from Tia and that how active are the action groups in West Africa presuming French-speaking countries would rather exchange in French and indeed we have a we have an action group that is that is actually being led by a Ghanaian institution it's the action group called Planning for Drought and Semi-Arid Africa and they they are very active and of course being from from Ghana a lot of their their activities are actually in English and they they are connected with other institutions and other countries across Africa that are English-speaking so in that sense it is more on the English-speaking side just to also mention that we we did launch the action group applications both in English and French so we gave the the same amount of opportunity for those that speak English or French to indeed apply and it just so happened that the ones that were leading the action groups came out as from from English-speaking countries and but that's not to say that they are other Anglophone or Francophone countries that are that are participating for example of Burkina Faso is participating in the upscaling potential of water harvesting across across Africa and and then there's also Burkina Faso that has been been involved in one of the first sets of action groups which is this sustainable intensification for resilience and food security the CIRAF action group where a lot of activities happened on the ground in Burkina Faso in that that action group so although not led by institutions from West Africa there there were Francophone-speaking countries that were involved with within those and the next question from Tia also came through to to say the rural water and sanitation network is another good network to to link to and yes thank you for that we indeed in the Afri Alliance network map that you can find on the Afri Alliance portal we are linked as a as a community as a network to to this network so so one that we are aware of and and indeed are connected to from from Esther from from Uganda just wanting to know how how she can be a part of this and and how indeed she can make make change so yeah Esther by by all means you can join our community on the Afri Alliance portal and and I think Luke has some of the final slides that that we can show you that just shows you how to that you can actually join the the community the Afri Alliance community and and you can send us an email and we can put you you on that that community there and and then from Leonardo Pincinetti hi Leonardo it's good to good to see you here a long time that we haven't we haven't spoken and interesting how to engage the MOOC and community engagement definitely something that we saw is real potential the the number of participants that we had from the MOOCs and as Luke said more than 800 participants really is a great source of African practitioners to join in on on such a on such a big movement in terms of water and climate activities in in Africa and and you've also given us a link to the FASTA project which links into the Tunisia so we'll have a look at that thank you thank you for for that and and looking at the different aspects related to that and with the another question that we have here from Wittfach thank you for the informative presentation and challenging work despite COVID-19 and you are interested in citizen science and any recommendations of references and tools on that so with that one Mark perhaps you would like to take this question so the the question here is that if there's any recommendations references for tools on citizen sites thanks thanks David we've just completed a four-year research project on this with the Water Research Commission here in South Africa and that that material is available free off the Water Research Commission website and downloading of that report is there but more than happy to engage one-on-one with that question as well if that's not successful and just following up on our email which was on our presentation info at ground truth and we can more than more than happy to engage further with some of the tools and some of the resource materials that we developed as part of that project and which fed through into this project so yeah it'd be great to chat more on that thanks Mark and then we have some final questions here with from Papé what what is the plan to duplicate the action groups in different places along the continent so from the Afri Alliance project obviously as you know we're coming to the end of the project we we had the objective at initially to set up 10 action groups across the continent those those are being completed and currently run and a lot of them are coming to the end of their activities but but what we but what we have managed to achieve through that time is to give a different concept to not just creating and once the project dies the action groups die with it but rather to to let the action groups take control of their own future to provide the the tools and and space for them to collaborate together and to create further action groups if they see the the requirement or indeed to connect with other communities of practice that are currently running across the continent so that these sort of activities can indeed be transferred to other parts of the of the continent and and some of these lessons learned that Jim has run through from from their side that that can actually be spread and and exchanged with with other organizations that might be looking to set up communities of practice and then the final question is from Miquel where he says that I suggest some of you may have attended the virtual citizen science and SDG conference last week if so what were the primary take-home messages from from that event so I personally didn't attend I don't know if any of the other panelists attended that that conference last week in case you have been there perhaps you can you can give some of your your take-home messages yeah David none none of the team from our side unfortunately we weren't even aware of it so who's surprised so that was a SDG conference and citizen science and yeah citizen science SDG conference apparently yeah so um so yeah but yeah okay so it seems that these are all the questions we have which is almost perfectly on time just four minutes over and so at this that point I'd just like to thank all of our panelists our presenters to today that have done a fantastic job in giving us a real outline of of the action groups and how they can remain sustainable and and how exactly the activities on the ground have taken place and and some really amazing work that has been done by the Ubuntu action group from from ground truth in in South Africa and all of their their colleagues and collaborators there as well so before we we close off this this webinar just like to let you know that AFRI Alliance is running a series of webinars that might be of your interest and these will be running through the the whole of November and December where we'll be looking at different aspects from the needs and solutions hub to the triple sensor approach will be which we've done both in English and in French looking at the Geodata portal and other AFRI Alliance databases that can be of a lot of interest in case you're looking to have areas of knowledge repositories that you might be looking to to attach to and then the final one is a data journey approach to development programs so you can register for those at that link there and the this information is obviously available on the AFRI Alliance website and you can pick up everything there or indeed from the the Twitter or LinkedIn pages from from AFRI Alliance so with that I just like to thank you all for for attending and remember that you can join our community from from the AFRI Alliance website and hopefully you see you at the next AFRI Alliance webinar thank you