Shaping the Future of Rural Africa: Online Training to Navigate the Water-Energy-Land Nexus

Building upon the success of the Joint Workshops held in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in October 2023, RE4AFAGRI is now launching online training courses beginning June 2024.

As part of RE4AFAGRI’s capacity building initiatives, these courses are designed to equip African researchers, analysts, business and policy makers with the knowledge necessary to navigate the water-energy-land nexus and rural development. Through a series of interactive modules, participants will delve into topics such as assessment and planning in the water resources, agriculture, irrigation, and energy sectors focusing on models, data and content that is open access and open source, and explore how this can be used to support scenario analysis and policy design.

Two courses, consisting of multiple modules, are on offer: RE4AFAGRI Dashboards & business models and RE4AFAGRI nexus scientific modelling framework. Participants may select a single or multiple modules. 

RE4AFAGRI Dashboards & business models course will introduce two data-driven tools intended for decision support related to development of small-scale renewables and irrigation to support rural agricultural development. This course consists of two modules: 

• Module D1: Tutorial on the RE4AFAGRI Dashboards & Modelling Platform
• Module D2: Tutorial on the Business models & techno-economic tool

Targeted at business analysts and policy makers, participants will gain familiarity with the RE4AFAGRI content, and be able to carry out standard tasks to derive insights from the tool demonstrated throughout the Module.

RE4AFAGRI nexus modelling framework course will introduce the scientific models behind the RE4AFARGI modelling platform. This course consists of five modules:

• Module M1: WaterCROP tutorial: assessing evapotranspiration and irrigation needs in the agricultural sector
• Module M2: M-LED tutorial: estimating and projecting actual and latent electricity demand across sectors at a high spatio-temporal granularity 
• Module M3: ONSSET tutorial: designing optimal electricity access expansion strategies at a high spatial granularity
• Module M4: MESSAGEix-Nexus tutorial: appraising synergies and trade-offs between energy, water and land development pathways and policies at the country-level
• Module M5: Interlinkages tutorial: connecting the outputs of each model in the RE4AFAGRI modelling platform to use them as inputs in other models. 

The course is tailored for researchers, analysts, academics with computer programming skills in a high-level language, such as Python, R, MATLAB, Julia, etc. By the end of the course, participants will gain familiarity with the RE4AFAGRI content, grasp the general concepts of the model, its application, setup, and understand the requirements for setting up this model in a different country or context.

The courses are free to attend, allowing participants to sign up for either or both courses and modules. Each module requires an approximate workload of 6 hours and spans over 4 weeks. 

Deadline: 15th May, 2024

Evaluation and certificate: Participants who complete a course, including watching relevant videos and passing the evaluation exercises, will be awarded a digital certificate for each completed module.