Climate Services for Africa Quarterly Progress Report to USAID April-June 2018

In East Africa, a key achievement was the development of a Djibouti Maproom by ICPAC staff, with minimal support from IRI. This Maproom is the first to be developed fully by an African institution and demonstrates progress towards the project's goal of embedding capacity within Regional Climate Centers to independently build the capacity of member state NMS. The Maproom was enabled by the development of an online tutorial and training on Maproom development at ICPAC. The Maproom is now online and temporarily available on the ICPAC Data Library until its intended adoption by the NMS of Djibouti. Another significant achievement in East Africa was the training and awareness-raising at the National Stakeholders Training Workshop in Kampala, Uganda, which aimed to help Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA) improve its capacity to provide user-oriented meteorological and climate products. In West Africa, several new Maproom components were installed at AGRHYMET, and bilingual (French-English) functionality and documentation were implemented. A project side event on "High-resolution online climate information for agricultural and food security decision-making in West Africa" showcased these tools and underlying work on seasonal prediction to about 40 participants of the PRESASS regional climate outlook forum. The project team also made progress on climate service investments, completing a journal manuscript on a willingness-to-pay choice experiment study and sharing it with experts for internal review. The team continued to collaborate with IFPRI, NMA, and EIAR around preparations for an economy-wide modeling study in Ethiopia and with ACPC around policy engagement and tentative plans for a joint methodology and knowledge-sharing workshop with the WISER initiative. In East Africa Regional Climate Information and Capacity Development, ICPAC staff developed and demonstrated their capacity to develop and modify Maprooms with limited support. This is the first Maproom developed independently by an African institution and is evidence of tangible progress towards the project's goal of embedding capacity within Regional Climate Centers to independently build the capacity of member state NMS. The project outputs were disseminated through a National Stakeholders Training Workshop for users of weather and climate information in Kampala, Uganda, which aimed to help Uganda National Meteorological Authority (UNMA) improve its capacity to provide user-oriented meteorological and climate products. Over 80 people from different sectors were trained, and project staff introduced the use of high-quality gridded datasets in providing climate information at a local scale relevant to farm decision-making via the maproom platform. In West Africa Regional Climate Information and Capacity Development, AGRHYMET organized and led a project special session on "High-resolution online climate information for agricultural and food security decision-making in West Africa" during the 2018 PRESASS pre-forum in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire. The session aimed to launch and demonstrate the new online AGRHYMET Maproom products, tailored to the needs of agriculture and food security management, and discuss with climate service users and providers the role that gridded historical climate information and downscaled seasonal forecasts could play in strengthening agricultural and food security management and the PRESASS process in Sudano-Sahelian West Africa. The session was attended by more than 40 participants primarily from member country NMS, and opening presentations by Drs. Seydou Traore (AGRHYMET), Alessandra Giannini (IRI), and Ousmane Ndiaye (ANACIM, Senegal) demonstrated the Maproom products and provided overviews of related work on seasonal prediction. The discussion prompted debate about NMS data sharing policies and what role AGRHYMET has to play in addressing this issue. The project team also made progress on the Agriculture and Food Security Maproom, refining the new Maproom and adding a new Wet Day Frequency Forecast, which allows the user to display the probability of seasonal wet days total. Hindcast data files (2001-2015) for forecast verification were generated and uploaded in the Data Library.