Learning Event in Kenya: Including Climate and Weather Information in Participatory Planning and Assessment Tools and Methods

The learning event was organized at the UN in Nairobi, co-hosted by the GFCS Adaptation Programme in Africa, the Kenya Meteorological Department and the UK Met Office.

Agreed Actions
The participants at the event agreed to continue sharing learning within the group and more widely to promote good practices. The following specific actions were agreed:
1. Establish a community of practice for continued sharing innovation and learning. This will be done primarily through the establishment of a Mailing List facilitated by the GFCS office where project outputs and information on relevant events will be shared. In addition it was agreed to hold a series of webinars to continue the discussions around three main themes that were identified as a priority: local/indigenous knowledge, monitoring and evaluation and sustainability/scaling up.
2. Create a knowledge space collecting all relevant material available by the GFCS office through revising the GFCS website and include a search function. Documents would be tagged with agreed categories/themes (for instance agriculture/Malawi/communication) and the site would be linked to other relevant web pages. The GFCS office will also use the information provided by organizations to update the GFCS “contributing” projects map.
3. Work towards developing a guidebook/sourcebook for climate service interventions, which would be a synthesis of existing practices with an agreement of some common principles in the delivery of climate services, but it was recognized that a lot more planning is required for this activity and the effort would require investment in time and resources from a number of organizations.
4. Continue joint efforts to strengthen coordination at the national level. At national level there needs to be multi agency platforms coordinated by the NMHSs to achieve greater convergence. Where possible climate service interventions planned and undertaken should include investment in the establishment and/or support of such platforms.

Summary of Discussions
Seven main themes emerged from the presentations and discussions: coordination, uptake of climate information, capacity building of intermediaries, sustainability and scaling up, indigenous/local knowledge and monitoring and evaluation.