 Good morning, hello, good afternoon, or good evening, depending on where you're joining us from. Welcome to Engineering for Change for E4C for short. Today we're very pleased to bring you the latest in E4C's 2015 webinar series. Today's webinar was developed in collaboration with members of the Resilient Africa Network or RAN. My name is Yana Aranda and I'll be moderating the webinar. When I'm not moderating webinars, I work with the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, or ASME, in the Engineering for Global Development Department as a Senior Program Manager. I'm thrilled to have all of you here today. I'd like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about today's webinar, Harnessing Technology to Strengthen Community's Resilience to Adverse Climate Effects. Just a few days ago, a federal scientist in the U.S. declared 2014 the warmest year on record. And just last night, President Obama emphasized the need for action on climate change in the state of the Union address. Climate change is a global issue and engineers are at the forefront of developing new technologies and strategies to address its effects. The Resilient Africa Network is a key actor in identifying and scaling innovative solutions in their work to strengthen communities resilience to adverse climate effects in sub-Saharan Africa. Aranda Southern Africa Resilience Innovation Lab at the University of Pretoria recently launched the Resilience Innovation Challenge for Food Security and Improved Income Generation, focusing on strengthening resilience by promoting life and entrepreneurship skills, diversifying to profitable enterprises, and improving farming skills. Today, we've invited Aranda's leaders to share their insights. We'd like to welcome Dr. Juan Chico Ngana, Director of Innovations of RAN, Dr. Christy Randel-Mcosi, Senior Faculty at the University of Pretoria, and substituting in for Dr. Roy, we have Debra Nguanga, who is the Engagement Manager of RAN. Thank you so much for all of you for joining us. Before we get rolling, I'd also like to take a moment to recognize the coordinators of the day-for-see webinars series generally. Along with myself, we have Holly Schneider-Brown and Victoria Chung of IEEE, along with my colleague Mike Mater of ASME. Thank you, team. If you would like to ask any questions or reach out to us with a recommendation for future topics and speakers, we invite you to contact any of the team members via the email address visible on the slide. Before we move on to our presenters, we thought it would be a great idea to remind you about IPPOR-C and who we are. We are a global community of nearly 800,000 people, such as engineers, technologists, representatives from NGOs, and social scientists who work together to solve humanitarian challenges faced by underserved communities worldwide, such as access to potable water, off-grid energy, effective healthcare, agriculture, sanitation, and other issues. We invite you to join IPPOR-C by becoming a member. IPPOR-C membership provides cost-free access to a growing inventory of field-tested solutions and related information from all the members of our coalition, including professional societies such as ASME, Archer Police, ASCE, SWE, and ASHRAE, as well as academic supporters such as MIT's V-Lab International Development Agency, such as USAID, EWVSA, and Practical Action, as well as access to a passionate, engaged community working to make people's lives better all over the world. Registration is easy and free. Check out our website, engineeringperchange.org, to learn more and sign up. The webinar you're participating in today is one installment of the IPPOR-C webinar series, the free, publicly available series of online seminars showcases the best practices in thinking of leaders in the field who bring new ideas and technology to bear on global development challenges. Information on upcoming installments to this series, as well as archive videos of past presentations, can be found on our page, engineeringperchange-webinars.org. If you're following us on Twitter today, I'd also like to invite you to join the conversation with our dedicated hashtag, that is hashtag E4C webinars. And we hope you have lots of things to say on that feed. Our next webinar will be on February 18th at 11 a.m. Eastern Standard Time, with Susan Davis, the Executive Director of Improve International, and will be looking at the topic of future-proofing water systems in developing countries, how to protect investments, and increase success through preventative maintenance, a really important issue. This is the E4C webinar page for registration details. And if you're already an E4C member, look out for an invitation to the webinar directly. So a few housekeeping items before we get started. On the screen you're now seeing there are a number of different widgets that relate to the dashboard on the bottom. The group chat is where you will interact with your fellow attendees and post any comments about the webinar. The Q&A widget allows you to submit any questions directly for the presenters. The help widget is for inquiries about any technical difficulties with resources and how to use the software and FAQs. You should share this to share the link of this webcast with your friends and colleagues through a variety of social media sites. The Twitter icon allows you to post directly to Twitter. And lastly, the Survey icon allows you to take our survey at any time. Now I know this is quite a bit, but always feel free to hover over the icon and you'll receive an explanation. To get you warmed up and to get a sense of who we have here, we know that we generally get folks from all over the world. So let's see where you're from. Using the group chat, please type your location. So we know how we have folks from all around and we thank you for joining us today. I see we have folks from Virginia, from Udaipur, from Washington, D.C., from Cambridge, Massachusetts, from Chicago, from Austria, from Cleveland, and from Littleston, Canada. Oh, Colorado. Apologize for the misfire on that one. Toronto, Madrid. Wow. We're very excited to have all of you here today. Thank you so much for joining us, taking the time. It's early in the morning if it's morning for you. During the webinar, continue to use the group chat. Type in any remarks you have. But don't forget to use the Q&A window to type your questions to the presenters directly. If you encounter any troubles viewing or hearing the webinar, you may want to try opening a webcast delete in a different browser. Also feel free to access the Help widget for technical help. Following the webinar, to request a certificate of completion showing one professional development hour or PDH for the session, please follow the instructions on the top of our webpage and your name for change-webinars.org. Wow, Zimbabwe, India, Italy. I'm amazed, so I'll just keep reading these out. So today, we will be missing Dr. Roy William Mayanga. But in his place, we are very excited to welcome Devra Nankwanga to present his section. So we are going to move on to introducing you to our next webinar presenter. Dr. Juan Jico Nganga is the Director of Innovation at Ron, Mycena University in Uganda, where she provides leadership and technical guidance on the sourcing and development of resilience strengthening innovation. She is also actively involved in developing a private network of resilience innovators across RAN's network of universities and community. Joining Dr. Juan Jico will be Dr. Christy Randall-Mkosi. Dr. Christy has a PhD in public health and is a senior lecturer in the School of Health Systems and Public Health at the University of Pretoria in South Africa. Most of her experience is in primary health care and community based rehabilitation in Gautank and Western Cape. Her recent research focuses on the prevention of fetal alcohol and syndrome, interactive care in PMT CT, health promoting school, and community health promotion program development evaluation. She has specific interests in the prevention of community level problems willing to alcohol abuse and has been involved nationally and internationally with training, advocacy, and material development in this regard. During 2014, she served as a faculty member supporting the SARI Lab, the stakeholder engagement and preparation for the Call of Innovations which she will be hearing about today. With that, I'm going to turn it over to our RAN presenters to share with us their insights. Thank you very much, Vienna, and thank you very much for inviting us and hosting RAN today. We feel very privileged and delighted to speak to all the participants through this webinar. We feel this is a very great opportunity to speak to such a huge network of engineers using this webinar. So briefly about resilient African network. RAN is one of the eight development labs under the Higher Education Solutions Network in the U.S. Global Development Lab. The Resilient African Network is a partnership among sub-Saharan African and American universities led by Materia Investi in Uganda. RAN is co-directed by Stanford University and Tulane University, and we have partners from Center for Strategic and International Studies who are working to develop the resilience of communities. RAN has four regional resilience innovation labs, which we call RA Labs, and one of them is located in Ghana, another in Ethiopia, in Uganda, and South Africa at University of Pretoria. RAN is supported and funded by the United States Agency for International Development, USAID, and its role is to strengthen the resilience of people and systems in Africa by leveraging the knowledge and scholarship and creativity that is used across the RAN to analyze vulnerabilities, define resilience dimensions, and apply innovative solutions. Other rationale for RAN is that although development efforts have been raised, we have not sufficiently built the resilience of target communities. The same shocks and stresses we occur with similar circumstances. RAN seeks to work with negative cycles by tapping into the adaptive capacity of communities to develop solutions. RAN is working with three main objectives. The first objective is to design a resilience framework for the sub-Saharan Africa, and the second objective is to strengthen the resilience of communities through innovation. And the last objective is about knowledge sharing, that is to enhance the resilience-related knowledge through sharing on our platforms, like e-learning platforms. RAN is working with a theory of change, but the resilience of people and systems in Africa will strengthen them through the scholarship and creativity within RAN to intubate, to test some scale innovations that target capabilities and reduce vulnerability identified by evidence-based resilience frameworks for sub-Saharan Africa. We're using this kind of methodology. We have two approaches for forcing innovation. One of them is to accelerate existing promising ideas, bring them into our labs, intubate them and pilot within our target communities. The other option is to identify totally new ideas and through calls like the one we're going to talk about today and then intubate the same and pilot within our communities. We are using all these, using the design thinking or the human-centered design methodology. And right now, I will request that I will welcome the Tauan Zipu to take us through the technology imperative and tell us more about the methodologies that we're using at Resilient Africa Network. Thank you, Deborah, for a good introduction about Resilient Africa Network. In our presentation, I want to focus on exactly what we mean by building resilience for the sub-Saharan resilience of whom and to what. So over the past two years, RAN has spent a considerable amount of time trying to understand the issues that cause lack of resilience in sub-Saharan Africa and identified six key thematic areas of focus. So we're looking at climate variability and its effects on livelihoods. We're looking at recurrence drought in the home of Africa. We're looking at food insecurity and low-income generation in southern Africa. We're looking at rapid urbanization in West Africa. We're also looking at the issue of internally displaced persons across the home of Africa, as well as chronic conflict. And what our audience should appreciate is that most of all these issues are interrelated with climate change and climate variability in one day or another. So in terms of building resilience, prioritize the issue of looking at advanced climate effects and asking how can we strengthen our communities to become more resilient to the effects of climate change, but also more importantly to mitigate these effects and also to strengthen the adaptive capacities that communities have been using over time. So how does climate variability manifest today? We're looking at effects such as very heavy rainfall that is maybe not what we have been used to over the many past years, resulting in floods and landslides. And this is very common in East Africa as well as Central and Southern Africa. Like right now, we know that there's a lot of rainfall and a lot of rain and fears of flooding happening in the southern part of Africa. Then we're also looking at things to do with drought, where rainfalls are not in the patterns that have been experienced or expected to fall as planned. So these results in drought and associated effects. So how does this climate variability affect our communities? The first thing is to note that most of our communities are subsistence farmers and if most of them are relying on agriculture, then while we have climate variability affecting productivity, producing harvest, affecting what communities have to eat, then there's a whole cycle of lack of resilience and poverty and disease and all those things that come without having a livelihood. So this is a very important challenge that Resilient Africa Network is taking to TACOM. We know it is a big challenge, but we believe that using innovative techniques to pass through the standard problem and design solutions that are really context-specific, we're going to have an impact on this. So one of us may ask, we're talking about climate variability, but how does this play at the household or at the community level? The first thing we know that our farmers lack practices or technologies that help them mitigate their cycle climate change. They still may be using practices that were used when there was less variability in the weather. So in terms of the kind of seeds that are there or the kind of farming techniques that are in use, how rapidly are they able to adapt their practices to suit the current challenges for their climate variability? Then the result is that they blow agricultural output and where in fact there is output. There are so many other factors that connive to ensure that the produce gets wasted. So for instance, you may harvest after a very good season, but then if the rains come in an unplanned when you don't have a proper storage facility, then you either end up losing most of your harvest or the harvest gets maybe too much moisture in its maize and a lot of that also gets low. So it's not just in terms of production, but even post harvesting, there are so many ways that farmers need support and this is why we're looking at technologies that can help our farmers in this. Then there's also the issue of flooding and last but not least, there have been lots of crops and assets as well as waterborne diseases that come along with flooding and landslides where communities are forced to move out of productive areas. Very important also is the issue of lack of portable water both for human consumption as well as for the animals and this happens not just where you have flooding but also where we have recurrent drought and farming where there's hardly any water and communities have to rely on very dirty water sources. So how can this be addressed? And very related to that where you don't have clean water, there are disease epidemics that also affect not just humans but also livestock. And there's a big relationship between human health and livestock health. And then there's also the issue of housing for communities that are affected by these climate-induced disasters like floods and chronic conflict as well as eternally deceased thousands of us in the Horn of Africa where we have the thousands of denies, refugees or the refugees from Somalia, etc. So what is the role of technology? We are speaking to a team or members with an engineering background. Our hypothesis is that we can use technology to help mitigate the effects of climate change either by changing the behavior or the practice or the knowledge of the communities that are largely farmers. So here we are looking at tons of production. Can we have better methods to do rainwater harvesting that are amenable to the context in which farmers live? How can we have low cost irrigation solutions? Then in terms of our post-havoc processing, what kind of storage facilities can we construct that are amenable to the local communities? How do we speed up maybe produce drying because a lot of the produce gets lost in fact there's a 60% of what is harvest that gets lost before it gets to market because of the post-havoc processing techniques if there are appropriate technologies or lack of knowledge or poor practices. The issue of water harvesting and safe storage, early warning systems especially for things like flooding or landslides and there's a bit of what's been done in that area but so far we haven't seen really robust interventions that can be applied across very remote settings in Africa. And then resilient housing, sanitation, water and sanitation solutions that would be working for flat-comb areas and high water table areas but also very importantly is diagnostic for diseases that come as a result of either water-related diseases or changes in climate. A good example is for instance Malaysia. This of course we know it varies of course whether when it's too much rainfall and it's too hot then we have more and more cases for malaria and many of the deaths come because of lack of diagnosis and we're thinking the same thing also with Ebola challenge in West Africa but at the time we identify that somebody is actually infected we don't have to for the 21 days incubation period to say that this person is infected. There is a big challenge for rapid diagnosis to build resilience of communities. So the other thing I want to highlight is the usage context because we may be asking the issues we're raising are not new we've talked about water harvesting, we've talked about irrigation and there are all the technologies of drip irrigation there are those types of irrigation where you put over plastic a policy-based path. But the big challenge we're saying is that when you're designing for local, to talk about local technologies where you should not even talk about power electricity off the grid so we're talking about maybe solar-powered technology we're talking about remote rural areas limited or low electricity with very few road networks communication networks even in terms of scaling or piloting a technology what is the value chain that ensures that this technology continues to get used because what happens is that you get a technology introduced maybe a solar lamp it works very well but when it breaks down there is no value chain around the fixing or the maintenance that the farmers are able to accept so we're not just asking for the hardcore technologies but it's also the business model around it to make this accessible and affordable and sustainable in very poor settings so we can we'll be looking for questions yesterday but I just thought it's good to highlight the kind of technologies we see are very important in terms of strengthening the community resilience to advance climate defense and at this point I would like to hand over to my colleague Dr. Chosti to talk about the exact context for the southern Africa region thank you so I was just thanking Dr. Wendickel for the introduction and I want to in general thank the RAN for the opportunity to be able to promote our particular call for innovation so it's rather a long name our resilience innovation challenge for food security and improved income generation so that's why we shortened it to hopefully what is fairly catchy which is zik for fi our lab is based at the University of Pretoria in South Africa and I just want to mention that we have university partners at the University of Lampokor which is also in South Africa and then at the Lelongwe University of Agriculture and that natural resources in Malawi and we have local persons at each of those universities as well as the local person based in Zimbabwe so we're working across three countries a bit of background information on the target community we've in fact got four communities across the three countries if I start first with a bit of introduction on the Zimbabwe context we're working at a town called Bike Bridge which is in southern Zimbabwe at the border with South Africa and it has a high prevalence of HIV and then the climatic challenges are mainly related to drought but because it's a border town there's high levels of labour migration and the resulting socio-economic problems and high levels of food insecurity in Malawi we focus on the Tikava District in southern Malawi across two traditional authorities and I'm sure people have been watching the news and as we speak now it's suffering from devastating floods where more than up to 200 people have lost their lives and more than 200,000 people have been displaced because their lands have been totally flooded so this is the situation that our call for innovation is in fact trying to deal with that they suffer these devastating floods and then they also have droughts leading to chronic food insecurity in South Africa we have two communities one is the Khadekhali community in the northern part of the country in Lampoko province there's villages that we're focusing on there in collaboration with the University of Lampoko and there the typical problems relate more to drought for the farmers and then just north of Pretoria we have a community called Pyramid it's a peri-urban area where there's some farming taking place but all the communities in the three countries that we are focusing on actually have a high HIV rate but we're not focusing directly on that but rather on some of the underlying problems relating to food security and income generation which perpetuates the cycle of poverty there's more information on all of these communities that we have collected through qualitative data collection and engagement with the communities during last year there's more information on the call document on the website that we'll link you to the website later but we learnt of the shocks and stresses in the communities based on the qualitative data and then we held a workshop with member institutions and the ran team from my career in order to select and design the intervention pathway so I would like to introduce you now to the Rick Forfig intervention pathway there's three of them the first one being improved life and entrepreneurship fields the second one being diversified local economy for resistance and the third one being transformed agricultural practices and markets for resilience if we look in more detail at intervention pathway one the basic problem is that people are constrained by lack of entrepreneurial skills and limited access to finance they also tend to have a low educational level so they want much human capacity capital to diversify in the country across the subcontinent there's up to 30% of people who are unemployed and therefore dependent on social grants and NGO work so the intervention pathway seeks solutions to develop models and approaches or technology for promoting life and entrepreneurship skills and this we want to focus specifically in South Africa and Malawi context we hope through this to reduce vulnerability to food insecurity and promote opportunities for income generation taking into account specific contexts in target communities in South Africa and Malawi perhaps some ideas that engineering parts might be interested in is that we need to pick up on entrepreneurship and business skills as well as promoting life skills so that possibly small businesses could be developed and that would be appropriate in both South Africa and Malawi the second intervention pathway is to diversify local economy for resilience the background to this is that because of the target communities being highly dependent on rain-fed subsistence farming they're vulnerable to the climatic challenges and their adaptation to this is limited because of the limited livelihood options as well as the limited financial access so the solution would be to empower target communities by diversifying their livelihoods using simple but highly profitable farm and non-farm businesses so the solution should be to create opportunities for better financial inclusion with savings and access to credit as well as the diversified businesses this would be to reduce vulnerability to student security and promote opportunities for income generation in the target communities of all three countries some ideas that are highlighted in the box on the right are that one would want to tap in South Africa context to a service-related market so that would be things like recycling and so on and empowering small livestock farmers to diversify their product in Malawi it might be technology that is oriented to business enterprises or early warnings for the flooding so that people can be more prepared an example in Zimbabwe would be that one might want to harness the natural resource product there's an example there from a piney worm these are naturally occurring worms in the trees in the bike bridge area which people harvest and dry and it serves as a source of protein so that could be maximized and done in a better quantity of equipment the third intervention parkway is related to transforming agricultural practices and markets to improve resilience here the background is that because of the dependence on subsistence agriculture and the challenge of the climatic problem then we need agricultural methods that are more effective than the current methods being used so that sufficient crops can be grown and livestock can be raised in a more efficient way and the challenge is to develop low cost environmentally friendly approaches and technology to increase agricultural yields for acreage and this is applicable in Zimbabwe and Malawi context and some examples would be to try and tackle the and develop drought tolerant agroforestry and again the flat early warnings increased surface irrigation possibilities and post harvest processing in Zimbabwe it might be built to do with livestock value additions drought tolerant agroforestry or rainwater harvesting just as examples there's two challenges under the third pathway the challenge number four is relating to agricultural markets or capitalising agricultural markets here the challenge is to develop models or approaches for agricultural markets of the future that promote new types of networks and distribution methods to capitalise enterprises and narrow the gap from farm to market again applicable in Zimbabwe and Malawi mostly and examples might be training of farmers to do their business in a different way and introducing technology that might assist with the market cycle testing for price leverage or transforming platforms that change the whole relationship to the markets to be near to the farmer so that's just a quick tour of the four challenges and all this information can be seen in more detail on the detailed document on our website but I think it's important to highlight that the innovations are not limited to technology but could be approaches, concepts or models and it doesn't necessarily have to be a brand new innovation or idea it could be something that has already been developed but is being now applied to address the problem or challenge that we have posed that would be applying it in a different social and geographical context so we're particularly interested in the sense that one would call paradigm changes that at least disrupt the business as usual that goes on and that has high transformative potential and scalability to give you a little bit of information relating to the actual structure of the grant it's structured in three phases over the next two and a half years the first phase is called the solution development phase and we would be awarding six innovative or groups of innovative grants and each grant is between the value of $15,000 and $35,000 the second phase would be the piloting or refining of the concept and we would select three of the six to go forward into this phase and they would be awarded between $35,000 and $65,000 the final phase which would be the scaling phase only two projects would be funded the amount is $75,000 to $125,000 we would also work with projects reaching phase two and three to try and secure additional funding from other sources to maximise the possibilities of success of these innovations who can apply it's basically any organisation from anywhere in the world but the main prerequisite is that it's a legally registered organisation in the country where it is based and it's following the laws in that particular place that's the only restriction otherwise we would encourage any organisation ranging from university students non-governmental organisations as well as community-based organisations to feel free to apply the fifth phase of the application is only a two-page concept note that needs to be filed in and the format can be found on our grant website which is grant.ranlab.for on that form you would indicate which specific challenge you are applying for and if you do choose to apply for more than one challenge you would fill in a form for each individual application or challenge and we are able to support any questions and answers and we have been posting the answers to frequently asked questions and we are also running this webinar as part of the promotion and explanation of the core so those are the support exhibitions so what happens to the concept note once we've received it all concept notes will be assessed we've established a panel of reviewers and they are grouped according to the different challenges so they are experts in relation to a particular challenge all concept notes will then be reviewed and a limited number of them will then be invited to submit a fuller application and the idea and the heart would address the challenges posed as well as the budget and so on so we expect to receive a few hundred of the initial concept notes and those will be then filtered down and a limited number of mainly between 30 and 40 would be asked to then submit a full application it is from these full applications that we would then be able to make the award of the first six innovations to work in phase one and the criteria that we would be applying in selecting those six is that they obviously need to align to the pathways and our theories for change they need to include human capacity development and agency that would have to contribute to the conservation of the environment as well as the of the nature that they they can be scaled up to a particular business model and again the full application would be reviewed by our panel of reviewers a little bit more detail on the time same thing so the six lucky innovators who get to be invited to participate in phase one they could run from May to November 2015 which is a six month period from those six we would then down to make three projects to continue into phase two which would run from December 2015 to September 2016 a period of nine months thereafter the two final projects that would go up to full scale would be supported from October 2016 to August 2017 a period of ten months and some brilliant ideas of support that the innovators who are part of phase one to three we would be giving a lot of training we would engage mentors that match the project and the needs of technical advice and there would be links to the community that I have described before so that the ideas can be piloted, tested and then scaled up in the final phase so finally just to make it clear that I've mentioned the website as well already and in the email if anybody has additional questions you're welcome to email support.sa-randa at randad.org or even phone us in Victoria on the number given on the slide so I hope that given some background information and some detail and that people's minds are picking over fast with potential ideas to then submit on the two page the two page concept note which needs to be uploaded and reached us by the 30th of January just over a week to put your ideas to the concept note so thank you for the opportunity I'm going to ask Dr. Wanjitra just to comment on the final slide that relates to collaboration opportunities Thank you Dr. Kersti for highlighting the RIK course challenge and it's clear what the innovation intervention passes are and I hope in all that presentation our attendees have seen opportunities for leveraging technology to address some of these challenges I just want to summarize this presentation by talking about collaboration opportunities between one and the big network of ASME and E4SB the first and most obvious process in developing interventions that can strengthen resilience to address climate crisis and as I said we put out open calls for RSA to respond to but more importantly making partnerships because technology on its own cannot really solve any problem it is the people who conceptualize the problem and develop it from a human centered perspective and then create the whole value chain to deliver the values that is important so you can come in as an individual with an idea through an RSA or through emailing us directly for our collaboration opportunities and we have four resilience labs engineers or academics or people from private sector in the countries that you are interested in working in in terms of building resilience then very important for us we are seeking mentors because as a university based network we are trying to develop innovative capacity because one of the most important ways to build resilience is to build capacity to solve one's problems so we are trying to develop capacity within the investment for innovation and that is a process that requires mentorship so we would be very happy to get mentors from the engineering discipline or from technology who would be willing to work with some of the students that are already funded and given seed grant to some are working on diagnostic some are working on solar irrigation there are people who are already doing very interesting stuff but what you need is technical expertise to help mentor and steer these thinking into tangible products then we are also looking for who will be willing to offer capacity to build either through webinars or even physical visits to our labs and our universities and that is this you have an email which says there is an area I am interested in in terms of the areas you highlighted and we can see how you can maybe talk to our team of APA's or team of students and we would be very happy to have that consolidation of ideas then as Kasi mentioned we are looking for expert resilience for expertise in any of the areas highlighted in the recall feed and you would be willing to serve as an expert review of the conference that I received we would also be very happy to hear from you and you can email the South Africa team on that the other aspect where we feel we would need expert expertise is on technology evaluation there are many technologies out there but whether they do what they can't do and whether they improve value there is not too much work being done in terms of technology evaluation and this is a new area for us we would be seeking people interested in that area of research or of evidence-building to also partner with us lastly and also very importantly is the partnerships either for expertise as well as for scaling we know the kind of grants we are giving may not be too much but it improves our concept and come up with a pilotable prototype where we need partners in the value chain from marketing from business models from access to the technologies that have been developed in terms of availing them to the poorest of the poor who need these technologies so we are looking for customers who feel they could offer something in terms of ensuring that the technologies and the challenges we are addressing do have an impact on the people that we are focusing on and those are really the families that are affected by these variables at the time also other developing parts of the world thank you very much for listening to us I will hand over to you thank you thank you so much Wanjiko thank you so much Krissi and Debra for the introduction to the challenges this has been really informative and I'm certainly quite pleased to see such tangible opportunities for us to continue working together and especially to engage with the E4C membership in contributing their skills and their resources so a number of questions that come in and for those of you who are interested in having a question answered please do enter that question into the Q&A widget so that we can keep track of those coming in I see there is a great conversation happening in the group so please do continue with that but I'm going to swing it over to the presenters now and there has been a request for the presenters to speak a little bit more broadly and provide some additional examples regarding the entrepreneurial skills and that aspect of the challenge and maybe you can speak a little bit about some examples that you've seen as effective already case studies that you maybe are able to share to spur the thinking of our attendee it's Krissi here can I talk to that? Sure I think the idea with seeing the entrepreneurial skills as a potential solution is that the dependence on subsistence farming has clearly got too many challenges in the subcontinent and with the countries developing quite fast in the sense of industrialisation and so on it seems that there have been quite successful innovations that can reach far and wide especially in several areas that may be using mobile technology that enhance access to finance and banking and communication so there's a lot happening in those areas that could possibly be linked with entrepreneurial skill development and that might increase the diversity for the farming community without them moving from the farming areas and then I think the idea is also in relation to maximising local economy things like small shops and other innovations that could actually simulate the local economy so that farmers can potentially get involved in other activities again without moving from where they are but engaging in other sorts of business activities relating to services or selling other consumable goods. Fantastic. So we're going to drill down into some specifics related to the challenges and then zoom out again. We have a couple of questions regarding the geographic specificity for the challenges. This particular listener is interested to know if there are some villages targeted and I apologize in advance for mispronouncing the locations here. Baitbridge, Matabellalan in Zimbabwe are there specific villages that are being kind of zeroed in on or is it more of a general call country-wide? The work in Zimbabwe would be very specific to the Baitbridge area and even more specific within the broader town of Baitbridge there are some specific villages which are being targeted. Unfortunately I don't have that information to hand right now but I think through email we can possibly respond to the person who is interested and get them that information. Fabulous. We encourage everyone to reach out to RAN representatives. I put up the slide now for you to see what the email address is for those of you who are interested in directly getting in touch and also the website where there is more information available. On the practical note as well there is a question regarding whether the call for submission for grants is open worldwide or if it is limited to USA contributors. My understanding is that it is open worldwide although the logistics of working with somebody from beyond the southern African area I'm not sure how we would sell especially when it comes to pilot testing in one of our demonstration sites and the scalability of standing it up. So officially it is open worldwide but the logistics may be a challenge. So I think you mentioned as part of the timeline that there is a period where there will be piloting and scaling I pushed the slide live now if I'm understanding at that time it would be required for those selected to be in country and available to go to both the training as well as the piloting and scaling phases. Is that correct? That would be my understanding but I think Dr. Wanjiko could comment as well. Dr. Wanjiko are you on mute? We're looking to really get a little bit, yes we can hear you. The question is related to the submissions coming from international submitters and whether there is an impact for those who are not located in Africa as they are selected and go through the process of the phases of the grant. Yes, so what we've done is that at the first stage what we're interested in is idea and we don't really care where they come from but by the time we make a decision to fund you we're going to have to create a local footprint because all our labs are situated within African universities so the ideas that would form a team around an idea so we would get the innovation from India or from the US would build a team around them that has a community footprint because we know that because we're using a human centered approach so you first have to be in the community to understand really what the problem is before we can then so the idea can come from anywhere but then we build a team around the idea I hope that answers the question I think that provides a good amount of context so we're going to continue drilling down into some of these specifics one of our listeners wants to know if you would welcome public-private partnerships as an example if an NGO with a social enterprise is developing a sustainable business model along with a private organization would that be something that is suitable for submission yes in fact if you go to our website we acknowledge different categories of applicants so we're looking at teams of individuals or teams from the university but we're also looking for non-governmental organizations and actually in the past call that we had more than 60 per cent of our applicants were NGOs so we very much welcome the private public partnership because that already brings the kind of partners we need to ensure that we get to the community fantastic and we have a question regarding some of the top priority areas with respect to technology on behalf I guess and according to RAN are there any identified top technology priority areas due to climate variability that need urgent intervention so for example are some of these areas such as housing or roads hospitals, agricultural practices like poor mechanization access terminities or poor harvest handling techniques are those ones that you would like to see kind of front and center yes thank you for that question when you talk about this particular theme of strengthening resilience to adverse climate effects so anything around agricultural production is a top priority so here we are looking at water technologies related to water from the harvesting to the storage to the purification we are also looking at things to do post harvest processing so from dryers to mechanize whatever processes in the farm transport to transport from the farm to the market or wherever so our priority would be technologies that empower families and then there is a very important aspect of alternative energy processing because right now we find that many of the communities continue to use wood steels and charcoal and in the face of climate change we should not be cutting down trees we should be planting more trees so what are these low cost alternative energy processes that is really really critical I don't know if you want to add but those are the ones that we do highlight and then of course our diagnostic medical diagnosis for common diseases like waterborne diseases for climate related use of malaria etc because our communities are really suffering from this right so it's quite broad so if someone's project is beyond the concept note stage at what point should they be submitting their idea to RIC for FIG since at this point you're seeking out those concepts okay I think I can also respond to that one so the concept note stage for the RIC for FIG is basically wanting to understand the idea you have and the justification that it builds with the lens in mind of our intervention pathways but as you submit your concept we also ask you to educate the level of development is it just an idea stage or do you have a working prototype or is it something that is ready to go to market meaning that if your project is ready to go to market you have a better advantage of somebody with an idea we have to judge the merit of the idea in terms of the potential to be resilient so at this stage we are working on all levels of development but the terminology is a concept for us because we are fast vetting the ideas at that stage and then we go to the full proposal so don't be discouraged or think that there's another phase you have to wait for if you already have something that's already built but the challenge is for you to demonstrate that you already have something that still it takes into account the concept of our community it is human centered that would be where the person would have to be innovative in trying to show the fit between what we are asking for and what we already conceptualize before our call so I'll relate to that it seems that someone's interested if there's target completion times for the submission so I suppose in terms of timelines for the concepts is there any constraints whatsoever Christine, you could answer that Well we went through that on one particular slide so the project would run a successful project would go over the three phases with different time frames for each phase and ultimately would complete in August 2017 so the first phase was made to November this year the second phase was December to September 2015 to 2016 which is nine months and then the final phase would be October 2016 to August 2017 which is ten months would that answer the question? Roger that so we have time for two more questions and we're going to be running over so I do apologize to those of you who had to help off the hour mark but this is a great question and maybe Wanjiku I believe you're going to tackle this one is what do you see the role of information technology in all of this Okay, thank you that's also a really good question and I'll be happy to answer it so of course when you look up information technology we're basically talking about collection as well as dissemination of either data information or knowledge so in terms of building resilience there are so many opportunities of the three levels so at the top we're talking about knowledge and also to mention that of course the mobile phone is a prevalent device of choice is building the capacities of the beneficiary either through information and that is being done a lot then there's also access to services so for instance if you come up with a seller irrigation and you want to go to save up to buy so we have this mobile based savings team that allow poor people to save up for something using a mobile savings team so ITD Canvas is a very critical service delivery but also in the area of data collection like sensor technology if you're trying to monitor the moisture content in some granary that you construct as a storage in the community then you can use a mobile based platform to collect that data and to send it to some central server or something so at the different levels of data information and knowledge there's a lot of scope and we see that from either empowering the community or helping us with the technology we're deploying to the community monitoring the use because we may be saying we've deployed this but we don't know whether people use this and I think there's a project I think that you see Berkeley where they actually monitor whether people use the cook so that they have designed by including sensors on that so there's a whole gamut of opportunity to leverage especially the mobile phone in Africa to collect information that can empower the designers and I want to add to that and build on that point and thank you so much for emphasizing some of these good examples for all of you who are listening and specifically seeking out examples of prior art we do have a variety of articles and engineering for change speaking exactly to some of these ITT4D innovations related to agriculture and beyond for you to draw inspiration from those so with that I'm just going to leave one last question which is a very practical question given that this webinar was held today and the application deadline is at this point nine days away is Rand considering pushing the deadline forward to allow those to participate in the webinar additional time to submit applications so I'm going to let you tackle that one and put you in the hot seat I think I'll just what I, okay Kassim maybe you can take that we would hope not to have to extend the deadline because otherwise it pushes the whole phase of you know program and already the project timing is quite tight and I think what I'd like to say to the person who posted the question is that they need to remember that it's only a two page concept note that needs to be in by the end of January so hopefully if you have the idea it wouldn't be take too much time to complete that two page and then if we include your idea after being reviewed we would then ask you for a detailed application and that you would have a longer time then to complete so I can just urge you to try and meet the 30th of January deadline we will be then counting up how many applications we have and what the quality is and possibly spending by two weeks but I'd rather you try and meet the January 30th deadline knowing that if you're selected on the concept note basis you would get an opportunity to then fill in a much fuller application which would then be needed to become potentially one of the six willing ones for phase one. Thank you for that that was a very diplomatic answer and we really appreciate it and for all of you who are listening we do have to sign off as we are quite over time but we want to thank all of you for attending for your wonderful questions and certainly we hope that you will submit your applications to this challenge and for those of you who are in the U.S. and are eligible to get professional development hours please follow the instructions on our page and submit the code that you see listed on the slide and any additional questions are very welcome at our webinar's email address webinars of engineering.org please become a member to get information about upcoming webinars and we look forward to catching all of you on our future webinars in 2015 and thank you all to our presenters Dr. Wanjiku Dr. Krisi and Deborah on behalf of Roy we thank you so very much for taking the time out of your busy days and staying late hours after work to speak with us so have a good one everyone and we will catch you on our next webinar take care.