African Great Lakes Information Platform
University of Nairobi and ACARE: An open, shared and relevant IT platform for state‑of‑the‑art knowledge and information sharing, learning and action
Total funding request:
$59,950
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Start Date: April 1, 2018
End Date: September 30, 2019
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Project partners:
University of Nairobi (Lead organization)
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Overview:
The 2017 African Great Lakes Conference, Entebbe, Uganda resolved to advance the African Great Lakes Information Platform (AGLI) a website established by The Nature Conservancy. The AGLI was created to promote research and collaboration and support decision-making to ensure the inter-generational sustainability of the lakes and their basins. The AGLI
Summary: During May of 2017, the African Great Lakes Conference (AGLC) was initiated by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) and the Lake Tanganyika Authority through the TNC’s African Great Lakes initiative. Funding for the AGLC and this project was made possible through the generous support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. The conference addressed the African Great Lakes, and was driven by stakeholders throughout the region. The AGLC was intended to advance cross-basin sustainable development solutions and long-term thinking on a range of topics including human and environmental health, biodiversity conservation, sustainable fisheries and aquaculture, climate change, and governance. A key outcome of the AGLC was the Resolution of the African Great Lakes Conference: Conservation and Development in a Changing Climate, a guiding document intended to serve as a resource for granting through the newly formed African Great Lakes Conservation Fund. Subsequent to the conference, a call for proposals was placed for projects and the African Center for Aquatic Research and Education along with its partners submitted proposals to create a long-term, highly collaborative lake committee process on the African Great Lakes. This project concerns the African Great Lakes Information Platform, a website intended to be a highly collaborative tool within, and among, the African Great Lakes scientific community and globally.
will be hosted at the University of Nairobi and managed jointly with the African Center for Aquatic Research and Education.
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Goal and Objectives:
The overall goal of this project is to ensure that the AGLI is improved, structured, maintained, and populated in a manner that the thematic information developed during the Conference can be easily accessed and continually used by researchers, practitioners, organisations, policy/decision-makers, managers, and end-users to advance the sustainable management of the lakes and their basins.
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To achieve this goal, the project will harness the expertise and resources of the University of Nairobi to administer the AGLI and use its researchers to facilitate the archiving and exchange of theme-based information that pertains to the lakes and their basins. The University of Nairobi will work closely with the ACARE to determine the best approaches and format for AGLI, and will draw upon expert advice to drive the incorporation of the AGLI as a communications tool under a lake committee approach that ACARE is developing on the AGL. These two organizations will create and facilitate AGLI so that it serves its original purpose outlined by TNC, which is to ultimately garner momentum of resources and focus to create powerful and authoritative data/information that will positively inform policy and management of the AGL. The AGLI will be structured to provide the information in various media formats for clearly identified working groups (e.g., lake committees, researchers, and decision-makers), and a diverse range of larger audiences. This project will determine the most appropriate and effective format for produced and published research and will make accessible project meta-data and research in near-real time. This will reduce duplication of efforts on each lake, provide useful information among lake stakeholders to ensure stronger and harmonized data-sets to properly inform freshwater policy and management, and amass resources of like-minded, compatible research efforts, resulting in more vigorous and robust research and results.
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For more information on this project, please contact Ted Lawrence of ACARE.
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