Inaugural speech of the Director General Ousmane Ndiaye

I am excited about the opportunity as well as the challenges of leading the African Center of Meteorological Application for Development (ACMAD).
After many years working with end-users (small-holder farmers, fishers, pastoralists, local decision makers, the private sector, etc.) on delivering climate information services through a multidisciplinary approach, I have come to appreciate the depth and various facets of the task. I will keep learning about and promoting good practices in Africa and the global south. Now it is a pleasure to be able to work on scaling up and leveraging at the continental level, by documenting all the continent’s best practices, and facilitating knowledge exchange between various regions in Africa for sustainability.

Africa is a very vulnerable environment with a lack of resources (infrastructural, financial, etc.), and in this era of climate change the continent should rely on anticipation as its most effective adaptation strategy.

Just a few days, we all witnessed the impacts of Cyclone Chido in the Southwest Indian Ocean, which demonstrates how the provision of weather and climate information at the right time and scale, with the right partnerships and using the right channels is more relevant than ever.

Our ambition is to raise ACMAD to a Center of Excellence where state-of-the-art climate science technologies (including Artificial Intelligence) will be used for seamless climate prediction (from hours to decades) which, with strong collaboration to tailor climate information, will inform decisions at all temporal and spatial scales.

This requires, of course, well dedicated and trained personal, up-to-date
equipment, and strong collaborations. We will reach our goal through building strong partnerships amongst all stakeholders including climate-science, social-sciences and communication experts, and decision makers and other beneficiaries including from the private sector.

Being a center at the continental level we will also ensure no community is left behind in terms of accessing climate information and capacity building initiatives, by ensuring that all climate initiatives conducted in Africa will be systematically documented, and that good practices are exchanged. This systematic documentation will be valuable (a) to promote good practices, and (b) to demonstrate the impact and value of climate services (M&E).

We will map at the continental level all these efforts to be able to tailor our efforts and act efficiently. Public – private sector collaboration, gender issues, and access to information for all will be our priority. In this regard, we will promote a cascading communication chain to facilitate the dissemination of the information from its source to the final users. We believe working with private sector could open potential for a sustainable provision of climate services through some forms of cost recovery on the service provided (insurance, voice and text messaging, mobile app, etc).

I can assure you of our commitment to support tailored climate service delivery, and our continuing commitment to work with our partners to keep our continent more resilient to climate hazards, and ACMAD will play a pivotal role through its mandate.