Sustainable Development of Research Capacity in West Africa

In West Africa, the management and efficient use of natural resources is becoming ever more important. This is largely due to steeply increasing demand through population growth and economic development, and through the effects of greater uncertainty due to climate and environmental change. Developing research capacity in these countries is an essential step in enabling them to assess their natural resources independently, and to develop national strategies and policies to manage their natural resources in the light of growing demand and increasing climatic uncertainty. The project “Sustainable Development of Research Capacity in West Africa based on the GLOWA Volta Project” (SDRC) is an 18 month project, funded by the German Ministry of Education and Research, to strengthen the research capacity in West Africa. The SDRC is based on three columns: I. knowledge transfer and strengthening of human capacity; II. strengthening of infrastructural research capacity; and III. strengthening the institutional capacity. The SDRC makes use of the wide range of research results and decision support tools developed in the GLOWA Volta Project (GVP), a nine-year, interdisciplinary research project (2000-2009) with a regional focus on the Volta Basin. The tools and models that have been transferred and trained in the framework of GVP and SDRC cover a range of topics, such as modeling the onset of the rainy season, hydrological, economic, hydro-economic modeling, GIS and Remote Sensing, and the training of database managers, to name a few. Infrastructural capacity is developed by the transfer of a micro-meteorological research network to the Meteorological Service of Burkina Faso, joint operation of a tele-transmitted hydrological gauging network with the Hydrological Service of Ghana, and the provision of hard- and software capacity to use the trained models. At the center of the SDRC effort is the strengthening of the Volta Basin Authority, a newly established river basin authority with a transnational mandate, by strengthening its supporting scientific network and through the transfer of a publicly accessible online Geoportal for the dissemination of geospatial data and research results. The Geoportal is an effort to overcome the data scarcity previously observed in the Volta Basin, and represents the first comprehensive, publicly accessible data- and meta-database for the Volta Basin. The Geoportal can be used to search for data, for interactive mapping or the download of ready-made maps, and to publish and share new data. Local institutions are actively involved in acquiring data for the Geoportal, and trained in its operation. For the contributing institutions, the protection of data ownership and the ability to manage data access and use rights are of great importance. It allows participating institutions to publish the existence of their data and facilitate access to it without sacrificing their ownership rights. The Geoportal can be accessed at http://131.220.109.6/Geoportal