WACREN is building the digital foundations that are increasingly critical to how Africa understands, models, and responds to climate change. By strengthening regional connectivity, enabling trusted data exchange, and supporting shared compute and skills ecosystems, WACREN is positioning research and education networks as key enablers of climate innovation across the continent. These efforts were highlighted at CALIBRATE 2026 in Accra, where Abigail Essel, WACREN’s Project Manager, presented on “Digital Infrastructure for Climate Innovation,” outlining how interoperable digital systems can support resilient, locally driven climate solutions. The discussion focused on the role of infrastructure in closing long-standing gaps in climate data access, collaboration, and innovation capacity. CALIBRATE is an annual summit dedicated to advancing climate entrepreneurship, knowledge exchange, and capacity building. Convened by the University of Water Science and Engineering (UWSE), the 2026 edition brought together stakeholders working across climate finance, Earth Observation, and institutional partnerships. The presentation highlighted that Africa’s climate innovation is constrained by fragmented data systems, limited environmental monitoring, and uneven datasets, which together weaken collaboration, policy evidence, and the effectiveness of AI-driven climate solutions. To address these gaps, WACREN has a five-layer climate digital infrastructure stack comprising connectivity, data infrastructure, identity and trust, compute and cloud, and skills and communities. The framework emphasises that these layers are interdependent and together form the backbone of any viable climate innovation ecosystem. Within this stack, the AfricaConnect backbone plays a central role. By 2025, it had expanded to twelve countries, linking African universities and research institutions to global research and education networks through partnerships with GÉANT and others. This connectivity enables access to Earth observation data, satellite services, and international research collaboration at scale. Complementing this are efforts to build FAIR-aligned data infrastructures, federate high-performance computing across multiple countries, and expand GPU access for data-intensive research and AI. WACREN also continues to support capacity development initiatives, including training in climate data analytics and emerging technologies such as IoT and LoRaWAN, as well as work on identity and trust systems that enable secure, large-scale collaboration. The presentation underscored the need for sustainability, digital sovereignty, and reduced fragmentation, with WACREN positioned to help coordinate the transition from fragmented systems to an integrated climate innovation infrastructure for Africa.
