Information Management Experts’ Capacity Enhanced on Nile Basin Data and Analytical Services
The Nile Basin Initiative, with support from the Nile Cooperation for Climate Resilience Project financed by the World Bank through the CIWA Trust Fund, sought to expand its data and analytics services (NB-DAS) for climate-resilient water resources management in the Nile Basin through innovative information services with the goal of strengthening the Basin Monitoring function through the generation of knowledge products from historical data that is freely accessible from the cloud to produce the basin monitoring/drought bulletins and development of actual evapotranspiration datasets.
NBI intends to leverage on the data available today in the public domain which is several folds larger and more comprehensive in terms of geographic and thematic coverage than those collected through in- situ efforts by countries. Ground observed data from the countries shall compliment that from global sources. With the complexity and nature of work that is ahead of the basin monitoring function, particularly data and information analytics, inputs into the activity requires multidisciplinary skills from experts to support climate-based data analytics for Nile Basin States, a properly developed analytic platform for communicating information products to stakeholders and a task team that administers progress of the activity.
On the 23 to 25 February the Nile Basin Initiative Deputy Executive Director Dr. Kizza Michael officiated the opening of a training for ICT Officers, Knowledge Management Experts, GIS Specialists and Water Resources Officers in, Addis Abba, Ethiopia to enhance their skills in the operation and maintenance on the Nile Basin Data and Analytics platform who will establish and maintain a database of stakeholders for the DAS user community constituted by experts in water resources management, water resources development, modelling, Agriculture, earth observation & remote sensing, energy, researchers.
The development of the NB-DAS platform has reached the outreach phase which includes trainings, development of knowledge products and hackathons. The overall output from this training is to ensure that the trained experts have the capacity to manage and maintain the NB-DAS platform.