Plenary: Keynote Presentations

Keynote speaker: Ms. Raquel Moses – “Race to resilience“

At its core the Race to Resilience global campaign helps us to build a resilient future for all stakeholders, including youth, local communities and indigenous peoples. Using an integrated system of policy, technology and community engagement to ensure all stakeholders are equally involved in the decision-making process. We must commit to creating an equitable and sustainable future, while putting people and nature first.

Keynote speaker: Dr. Boniface Akuku – “Harnessing Digitization of Climate Information Services for Sustainable Development in Africa’s Food security“

African agriculture and rural development need urgent digital and data-based transformation. The competitive advantage of African agriculture relies on exploiting scalable digital solutions and climate services for change and impact. Kenya, for example, has shown that digitization of the agricultural sector through a public sector-led initiative is a promising approach to scale up proactive adaptation practices instead of crisis response. Most developing countries still rely on ex-post crisis response through humanitarian aid. Therefore, a shift from crisis response to ex-ante climate risk management is required. Adopting Climate Smart Adaptative (CSA) practices should also remain Africa’s priority and a mechanism for reducing poverty and sharing prosperity in a changing climate. African smallholder farmers require proactive approaches to produce more food with less water, herbicides, pesticides, and land and not hurt the environment.