Philip currently manages the project “strengthening of Resilience of the IGAD region to the Adverse Impacts of Climate Change through effective Adaptation and Mitigation Actions (RICCAMA) for the IGAD Member States.

• • Leads the initiative in analyzing the status of the climate in Eastern Africa.
  • Previously, Senior Climate Risk Analyst with the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP), Regional Bureau for Eastern Africa region. Published the Greater Horn of Africa climate risks and food security Atlas.
  • The first head of Eastern Africa group of Expert Team of the World Climate Research Programme that initiated Coordinated Regional Downscaling Experiment (CORDEX) on the analysis of climate change information over the region.
  • He holds Post Doc in Climate Change Modelling from UK-Met Office and Ph.D in Meteorology, from the University of Nairobi.
  • He is also a Senior Associate Lecturer at the Institute of Climate Change and Adaptation (ICCA), Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Nairobi, Kenya.

Benedicte Giæver is the Executive Director of NORCAP, a part of the Norwegian Refugee Council. Giæver has leadership experience from the Humanitarian, Development and Peacebuilding sectors and more than a decade of field experience from Africa and the Balkans. She has worked for various UN agencies, the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) and the International Federation of the Red Cross (IFRC). Giæver holds a degree in Development Economics as well as a master’s degree in Gender Analysis Development from the University of East Anglia in England.

Abebe Tadege is currently a Climate Change Officer at IGAD Climate Prediction and Application Centre (ICPAC) and ICPAC Principal Investigator for the DOWN2EARTH Research Project. His Educational background is in Applied and Agricultural Meteorology, Physics and Advanced Weather Forecasting. His expertise includes climate change, climate variability, climate services and climate risk assessments. Before joining he was the head of Research and Studies in the Department of National Meteorological Agency of Ethiopia. Abebe has over 25 years work experience and initiated and successfully managed several national and regional climate change related projects hosted by national governments and regional institutions including first national communication of Ethiopian to the UNFCCC, National Adaptation Plan of Action (NAPA) and IGAD Regional Climate Change Strategy. He advised the government of Ethiopia on matters relating to climate change including on the ratification of the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol. Abebe also served on the least developed countries expert group (LEG) of the UNFCCC from 2002-2004 and contributed in the writing of the NAPA guidelines. Abebe’s current areas of interest includes improvement of climate services that support decision making for minimizing risks and optimizing resource use including research in attribution of extreme weather and climate events such as droughts and floods and their associated losses and damages...”

Dr. Sarra Touzi is a Senior Water and Climate Specialist at the Global Water Partnership (GWP). For more than 25 years of experience, she worked with countries to enhance their water and climate resilience, support inclusive climate action planning, access to climate funds, build enabling institutional frameworks, and accelerate NDCs and NAPs implementation and SDGs achievement.

Currently, Dr. Touzi is supporting the implementation of the AU AIP multi-country GCF readiness project benefiting 15 african countries and aiming to accelerate water and climate resilience investments.

Dr. Touzi is a hydraulic and rural engineer. She holds a MSc on water science and PhD on management sciences with focus on private sector participation in water services. She is based in Tunis, Tunisia

Dr Lawal, is an atmospheric scientist, computational meteorologist, expert in numerical weather and climate prediction, and climate change and attribution processes. He studied meteorology at the Federal University of Technology, Akure, Nigeria and obtained his PhD in atmospheric science (with a specialization in Numerical Weather Prediction (NWP), Seasonal Climate Prediction and Regional Climate Modelling) at the University of Cape Town (UCT), South Africa. He worked as an Aeronautical Meteorologist, an instructor and also the pioneer General Manager of the NWP unit in the Nigerian Meteorological Agency (NiMet). Presently, he is a Research Associate at the UCT’s African Climate and Development Initiatives (ACDI) and also a Climate Change Thematic Expert at the African Centre of Meteorological Application for Development (ACMAD), Niamey, Niger Republic. Recently, he was appointed as an adjunct Professor in the Department of Meteorology, African Aviation and Aerospace University, Abuja, Nigeria. Lawal’s research interests range from seasonal climate prediction, synoptic and computational meteorology to numerical weather prediction; he has many peer-reviewed scientific publications to his credit.

Harsen Nyambe is the Director of Blue Economy and Sustainable Environment at the African Union. He has 23 years of professional experience, of which, 14 years of his career has been in international organisations covering the Southern African Development Community (SADC) as a Senior Programme Manager responsible for Natural Resources, the Commonwealth Secretariat as Head of Climate Change,

and the African Union Commission. Prior to that, he served as a Deputy Director in the Ministry of Environment and Tourism and in the Ministry of Agriculture, Water, and Forestry of Namibia. He was also once a Head of the National Remote Sensing Centre in the Government of the Republic of Namibia. Furthermore, he taught Environmental Impact Assessment and Ecology at the University of Namibia. His passion lies in fostering sustainable development through effective management of natural resources and the environment