The AfriAlliance events held were prime opportunities to strengthen and enrich coordination among diverse stakeholders from Africa and the EU on concrete issues, projects and initiatives. The inaugural AfriAlliance Conference in South Africa (2017) exposed AfriAlliance to more than 400 delegates. Knowledge brokerage events served as a platform to further bring together the demand and supply sides of innovations for the water and climate sectors across the continent. In total, 6 Innovation Bridge Events were held, alongside 9 Brokerage Roadshows. The Final AfriAlliance Conference was held online in 2020, with over 200 delegates present at four dedicated sessions.
Moreover, the AfriAlliance Online Platform provided a channel for exchanging information and knowledge to various water and climate related actors. A completely revised version of the platform was launched in April 2019 which had >50,000 visits since going online.
Following two competitive calls, AfriAlliance launched 10 Action Groups, each of which brought together African and European peers with relevant knowledge and expertise to work jointly towards demand-driven, implementable solutions and resulted in 4 joint follow-up proposals.
In order to inform various AfriAlliance activities, stakeholder identification, mapping, analysis and visualisation activities were undertaken to identify vulnerabilities to climate change and priority areas for actions to take place at local level in Africa. Moreover, research was carried out into the reasons for knowledge fragmentation across the many stakeholders involved in water and climate issues in Africa and between Africa and the EU.
Interactive workshops and interviews were undertaken in four different regions in Africa to identify the local needs of African stakeholders arising from Climate Change, involving >130 stakeholders from 36 countries in Africa. These helped identify the nature of local needs of water managing organisations and their prioritisation, and of the barriers for African stakeholders to implement existing solutions. An AfriAlliance online Needs & Solutions Hub was designed and set up to serve as the basis for the matching of demand for, and supply of, innovative solutions.
Research into the required long term water-related knowledge base in Africa to face the impacts of Climate Change generated the basis for strategically enhancing collaboration within Africa and between Africa and the EU.
In order to improve monitoring and forecasting (M&F) processes and water data and information access tools, a web-based mapping service was set-up and a comprehensive analysis report produced on constraints, barriers and opportunities for using the triple sensor data for M&F of water and climate challenges. The open access AfriAlliance Geodata Portal was developed which contains metadata on water and climate information sources of Africa to strengthen water and climate monitoring and forecasting processes, and use of data collection and analysis tools in Africa.
Two Massive Open Online Courses were implemented to raise awareness of the impacts of climate change on water resources and how to address these, with >600 and >800 participants, respectively. Diverse and intensive communication efforts ensured good attendance in the AfriAlliance events and activities. This was complemented by a ten-part, bilingual webinar series to present the results of the project.
