Digitization of Kenya County Climate Risk Profiles

Digitization of Kenya County Climate Risk Profiles

1.Host Institution:
The Alliance of Bioversity and CIAT, CIAT Regional Office for Africa| Duduville Campus, off Kasarani Road. P.O. Box 823-00621, Nairobi, Kenya | Phone: +254 20 8632800 | +254 721 574967

2. Supervisors:
(1) Fridah Nyakundi (f.nyakundi@cgiar.org)

(2) Leroy Mwanzia (L.Mwanzia@cgiar.org)

(3) Jaquet, Stephanie (S.Jaquet@cgiar.org)

(4) Aniruddha Ghosh (a.ghosh@cgiar.org)

3. Project Description:
Kenyan smallholder farmers face an uphill struggle to achieve sufficient production to sustain their livelihood. In the past few decades’ recurrent droughts and floods resulting from climate change aggravated these challenges. Various global and regional climate models indicate that the effect of changing climate is likely to result in more uncertainties climate conditions, resulting in severe food insecurity. To address these challenges, the Alliance of Bioversity International and CIAT has developed the climate risk profiles of 45 rural counties in Kenya that outline main climatic hazards and relevant Climate-Smart Agriculture (CSA) technologies for various value chains. The work has been supported by the Kenyan Government and World Bank. The aim is to inform the government and stakeholders to design policies integrating climate change into the subnational and national development agenda.

The underlying data (output of various climate modeling exercises, in-depth analysis of secondary sources, workshops) has the potential to guide other policy implications if it is well curated and structured to form interactive tools. The intern(s) are expected to support the following objectives:

1. Curate data from 45 countries into a standard usable format.
2. Develop reproducible routines (R/Python) to standardize various geospatial data layers involved in the Kenya County Climate Risk Profiles.
3. Design an interactive data exploration tool (e.g. based on RShiny) to make the dataset open and easy to use for non-experts.

The intern will receive initial training on required programming skills during the project period. Additional training will be provided on database management.

4. Expected Outcomes:
The project will deliver:

1. a clean and standardized dataset from the 45 counties that were profiled
2. an interactive dashboard that will be used to visualize the data such that
3. a data paper published in open access journal such as https://www.journals.elsevier.com/data-in-brief, https://www.mdpi.com/journal/data or https://www.nature.com/sdata/

In the long-term, we believe the data product and the dashboard will be used by various stakeholders to decide where to target specific types of agricultural investment in Kenya.

Applications for this internship should be submitted via the online application system, stating clearly the title of the internship.

Deadline for applications: February 28th, 2021 at 11:59 PM Central Africa Time (CAT)

Any inquiries about these internships should be sent to:
aims-ms4cr.internship@nexteinstein.org.