Zimbabwe: 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 southern 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.
Speaker at the same event, John Gosier, Apps4Africa: Climate Challenge project coordinator, said “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.”
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, South Africa.
