In February 2018, Future Climate for Africa (FCFA) programme’s AMMA-2050 research consortium held its annual meeting at the Agropolis centre in Montpellier, France. The meeting was part of the annual review and planning process carried out with team members from Senegal, Burkina Faso, France and the UK.
AMMA-2050 is working to better understand high impact weather events across West Africa with a focus on climate smart agriculture in Senegal and flood resilience in urban areas in Burkina Faso. The project aims to support planning, policymaking and practice under changing climatic conditions.
The annual meeting included four days of robust engagements including:
Testing the plateau game in Senegal (credit Francois Affholder)
Innovative engagement tools such as theatre and games are being used to involve users and decision makers. A theatre piece developed under a separate project to engage farming communities in Senegal on genetic resources was screened during the event. Based on AMMA-2050’s work in Senegal a new theatre piece is being developed for similar purposes. In addition, an exercise called “the plateau game” is being adapted to encourage farming communities to discuss climate change and ensure that farmer-drawn adaptation options inform adaptation-modeling process to improve realism. As these and other tools continue to be used in the project, this coming year of research and engagement promises to yield interesting insights about climate research into use.
This blog was written by FCFA’s Nkulumo Zinyengere

AMMA-2050 team at the annual meeting in Montpellier
- A training session for consortium members on engaging stakeholders in-country.
- Keynote speeches to introduce other projects that could be potential collaborators for AMMA-2050. These included presentations by Prof. Christof Bouvier on the RainCell project working on flooding in Ougadougou, Burkina Faso and Barbara Evans on the water, sanitation and hygiene work of FCFA’s HyCRISTAL in east African cities.
- On-going cross-fertilization of ideas across different work packages in the project to coordinate contributions to project delivery.
