Fund promotes African adaptation to climate change

David Njagi and Naomi Antony in SciDev.net: Africa's most marginalised communities will be able to share their experiences of adapting to climate change thanks to a new fund that seeks to promote knowledge sharing across the continent. AfricaAdapt, a network set up in May to aid the flow of information between stakeholders, launched a Knowledge Sharing Innovation Fund last month (16 June), offering grants of up to US$10,000 to projects testing new ways of sharing knowledge, such as theatre performances and radio broadcasts.

The network, funded by the UK Department for International Development and Canada's International Development Research Centre, is a collaboration between the UK-based Institute of Development Studies and three African research organisations: Environment and Development in the Third World, the Forum for Agricultural Research in Africa (FARA), and the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre.

"Our expectation for AfricaAdapt is that communities in Africa who are most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change will be able to draw on information shared within the network — both scientific research and indigenous knowledge — and use it to cope with or become more resilient to climate-change impacts," says Jacqueline Nnam, knowledge-sharing officer at FARA….

At the market in Kilingili, Kenya, shot by JimSlim, Wikimedia Commons, under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2