A manual for co‑production in African weather and climate services

The Weather and Climate Services for Africa (WISER) programme’s mission is to deliver transformational change in the quality, accessibility and use of weather and climate information services at all levels of decision- making for sustainable development in Africa. WISER is a programme of the UK Department for International Development (DFID) which is split into two components: one Pan-African, managed by the African Climate Policy Center (ACPC); and the other focused on East Africa, managed by the Met Office, based in the UK.

Under the East Africa component, ve quick-start projects were commissioned in late 2015 and completed in 2018. A further series of projects comprising Phase 2 started in early 2018 and will be completed in 2020. WISER Phase 2 projects have a focus on applying co-production approaches in order to improve the uptake and use of weather and climate services. One Phase 2 project, TRANSFORM, was tasked with improving the learning and sharing of information between projects, and more broadly. This manual is a key deliverable of the TRANSFORM project and is intended to provide more practical information, drawing on learnings from WISER and other programmes.

This manual outlines the building blocks and principles for implementing co-production as well as guidance on finding the value in good co-production. The manual is supported by a suite of case studies of co-production drawn from across Africa. These case studies demonstrate how implementing the principles and building blocks play out in practice.