SAFE4ALL Africa

Safeguarding African Foodsheds and Ecosystems for all Actors across Local, regional and international Levels to manage migration (SAFE4ALL)

Agriculture serves as the backbone of livelihoods for over 2.5 billion people worldwide, with African rural communities increasingly shifting towards market-oriented farming practices. However, escalating climate risks, including extreme weather events, threaten agricultural stability, worser food insecurity and migration patterns. Recognizing these challenges, SAFE4ALL aims to provide localized, scalable climate information services to empower local actors in decision-making, thereby safeguarding African foodsheds and enhancing community resilience. Climate resilience and adaptation measures can help prevent migration to cities in Africa by ensuring that communities are better equipped to cope with the impacts of climate change, such as droughts, floods, and other extreme weather events, while ensuring food security is enhanced with associated policies.

This initiative, funded by the Horizon Europe Framework Programme, stands as a beacon of hope in addressing critical issues of food security, disaster management, and migration across three African countries: Ghana, Kenya, and Zimbabwe.

The project aims to harness the EU climate services landscape and leverage it with local knowledge from African case studies to co-create information and facilitate its uptake at local, district and regional levels.

Part of Weather Impact’s contribution in this project entails the further development and pilot testing of our Uliza-WI chatbot, an innovative Telegram chatbot that provides a range of climate-adaptive services: from localized weather forecasts, to crop specific advisories and sub-seasonal forecasts, including the start of the rain season.

A significant advantage of the chatbot is its two-way communication capability, allowing Weather Impact to directly receive field information from farmers. This feedback loop enables continuous refinement and improvement of our advisories. Additionally, Uliza-WI’s services are crop-specific, location-specific, and available in multiple languages, ensuring accessibility for diverse farming communities.

Fig.1 Uliza-WI chatbot

Next to this, Weather Impact leads the work package on local sustainability, where the aim is to develop roadmaps and sustainable business models for the various SAFE4ALL climate services, but also focus on local ownership, transfer of services, institutionalization, and capacity building.

March 2024 marked the kickoff of SAFE4ALL Africa, with the first General Assembly at Wageningen University & Reserarch in the Netherlands. All 16 European and African partners joined for dynamic discussions, field visits and showing their initiatives, signifying a collective commitment to drive innovation within the EU climate services landscape, particularly within African communities.

In October 2024, farmers in Ghana and Zimbabwe have starting testing the Uliza-WI chatbot, which is a very important step to make sure the chatbot is user-friendly and clear to understand. Farmers are evaluating everything from the chatbot’s design, colors, and emojis to the ease of navigation and clarity of instructions. Their feedback is key to make improvements and ensure it meets farmers’ needs.

Farmers in Zimbabwe are pleased that they were able to prepare in advance for the coming rains, thanks to the chatbot’s forecasts. The chatbot user test group was really happy the forecast was correct.

Please read the full update here.

In March 2025 the SAFE4ALL General Assembly took place in Accra, Ghana. All partners met again for engaging workshops, open discussions and a look back at the project’s achievements over the past year. Part of the program was a field trip to the Ashaiman Irrigation project, to provide a closer look to the local realities of climate adaptation in practice. The rest of the week had a more technical focus, to dive deeper into the development and implementation of project tools.