U.S. pushes for African solutions to climate change

Harare, December 16th 2011: The United States government is banking on innovations and technology from Africa to address the challenge of climate change with the Apps4Africa: Climate Challenge Program. The Apps4Africa competition will be rolled out to countries in Southern Africa in 2012 according to a senior United States government official.

“This approach echoes President Obama’s statement in Ghana in 2009 that the future of Africa is in the hands of the African people. Appsfor Africa is allowing Africans to come together and discuss the challenges, explore applications and respond to those challenges using technical solutions developed in Africa,” said Bruce Wharton, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Africa. Wharton spoke with African journalists in a telepress conference hosted by U. S. Embassies throughout Africa December 15.

The U.S. is sponsoring Apps4Africa: Climate Challenge (www.apps4africa.org), a series of three regional competitions to develop innovative, web-based and mobile technology solutions to local climate change challenges. These contests build on the outcomes of regional climate change adaptation workshops organized by the Adaptation Partnership, which includes the United States and more than 20 other countries.

“The applications that are coming out of this process are really very cool, very exciting things like helping hospitals manage during storms, helping farmers do a better job of managing their cattle herd,” said Wharton (in picture) who hailed previous innovations from Zimbabwe in the ICT sector.

Zimbabwe has witnessed several innovations in the new information and communications technology sector. These include the online civil society communication platform, Kubatana, which received the Breaking Borders Award in 2009. Another initiative from the same organization, Freedom Fone, was awarded the SABC-Telkom Highway Africa New Media Award in the Non-profit category in September this year.

However, Wharton emphasized that the competition will specifically target innovations that work to fight climate change noting the benefits of young innovators and entrepreneurs in participating in the contest.

“A number of entrants to the competition are building on pre-existing platforms…one of the honourable mentions was iprotect, which was built on pre-existing platforms…we just need to see people take these things a step further,” said Gosier.

The West/Central Africa Regional competition concluded in early December and winners were announced on December 7th by the U.S. at the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP17) in Durban.

Apps4Africa: Climate Challenge project coordinator, Jon Gosier, said the contest will be rolled out in Southern Africa, building on the success of the 2010 Apps4Africa: Civic Challenge that ran in Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda and Tanzania. Civil society groups and citizens challenged program developers to find innovative technological solutions to everyday problems on issues ranging from transparency and governance to health and education. The winning application – iCow – enables farmers to better manage breeding periods of their cows and monitor nutrition leading up to the calving day, helping farmers yield the most from their farms.

He said his organization was working with other organizations to ensure contestants benefit beyond the duration of the competition.

“We are working with organisations to help proliferate the Apps that have been developed for the competition throughout different parts of the world; it’s a huge net benefit for the participants. It is not a requirement that everyone open-sources, but it is working favourably so we encourage it,” said Gosier (left), who is also co-Founder of metaLayer. Prior to metaLayer, Gosier founded the East African software development firm Appfrica before joining the open-source disaster response organization Ushahidi building an algorithm for verifying the accuracy of real-time information for which it won the Knight News Challenge.

“The important thing that came out of Durban is that basically everybody understands and agrees that we have got to keep working on this. The fundamental agreement that came out of Durban is that we are not going to give up,” said Wharton in reference to the two-week Conference of Parties climate change conference held in Durban, South Africa- ZimPAS© December 16, 2011.