The FOCUS Africa Capacity Building Training Programme

The specific services development often requires impacts tools using high resolution climate variables as input and delivering bespoke actionable indicators understandable by stakeholders in specific sectors (i.e., start of the agriculture season, dry spell length for agriculture). Delivering these actionable indicators for decision making is a challenge addressed as part of the FOCUS-Africa project.  The FOCUS-Africa project aims to develop sustainable tailored climate services in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region for four sectors: agriculture and food security, water, energy and infrastructure. More information about the FOCUS-Africa project can be found at: http://focus-africaproject.eu/.

To ensure sustainability of the project’s useful tools, it is proposed to organize trainings for further expansion of these tools use to improve the portfolio of climate services of the Regional Climate Outlook Fora therefore meeting the needs of sector stakeholders for actionable information considered urgent in the changing climate. Over the past almost 30 years since SARCOF’s started, seasonal outlooks were only given as probabilities and users have been having a hard time using the information to plan for their different sectors. Even though the SARCOF process introduced the UIP during SARCOF-19 in Angola in 2019, and included stakeholders from the Agriculture, Water, Energy, DRR and health sectors, stakeholders had to discuss the implications of the outlook without quantitative information on expected climate impacts on their sectors. Stakeholders from the region have expressed a strong need for specific tools to help them plan effectively and mitigate the impacts of climate change.