Awards

Saliou Fall of the Institut Senegalais de Recherches Agricoles in Senegal will develop techniques to estimate biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) by legume crops to guide their use as alternatives to nitrogen fertilizers for more sustainable agriculture. They will assess BNF by estimating three underlying components. Crop biomass and the proportion that is nitrogen will be estimated by AI-based models, and the nitrogen fraction that comes from BNF will be estimated by measuring the levels of a stable isotope of nitrogen in the soil and in the plants. As test crops for data to train the AI models, they will grow groundnut and cowpea as staple legumes, with an adjacent non-nitrogen-fixing crop, and crotalaria as a cover crop. They will acquire images of the crops from drones or mobile phone applications, and perform laboratory analyses, including measuring biomass, analysis by near-infrared spectroscopy and wet chemistry, and measuring the natural isotope of nitrogen.

Daniel Kwaro of CREATES in Kenya will develop an early warning system for malaria outbreaks, floods, and heatwaves in Siaya County in Kenya, co-designing it with the local community. They will incorporate health and demographic surveillance system data, including a specific focus on maternal health indicators and birth outcomes, as well as data from automated weather stations, wearable devices, and mosquito traps. Through secondary data analyses, they will assess the probability and consequences of climate-related hazards, including identifying vulnerable communities, high-risk geographical areas, and occurrence patterns of climate-sensitive diseases. They will actively involve Siaya County residents, healthcare providers, and relevant local authorities in co-designing the early warning system paired with multiple mechanisms for communication to ensure the system is accessible and effective in responding to local needs.

Aline Rocha of Fiocruz in Brazil will link datasets through the Center for Data Integration and Knowledge in Health (CIDACS) to measure the impact of extreme climate events on maternal and infant nutritional outcomes across diverse ecological settings and population groups in Brazil. They will integrate longitudinal data from two datasets, the 100 Million Brazilian Cohort and the Climate and Health Data Platform, connecting them through the municipality where mothers reside. The cohort database links data from social protection programs to administrative and health databases to assess the social determinants of health. The data platform extracts and links climate and environmental data from the year 2000 onwards from existing open-source databases. The integration of these two datasets will guide evidence-based programs to enhance the resilience of health services and mitigate the effects of climate change on maternal and child health, particularly for those most vulnerable.

This grant is funded by Grand Challenges Brazil.

Livia Casseb of Evandro Chagas Institute in Brazil will develop models to understand and predict the impact of climate change on the Aedes mosquito-transmitted arboviral diseases dengue, chikungunya, and Zika in Brazil. The models will integrate a variety of existing data for the different geographic regions of Brazil, including historical data on climate, landscape characteristics, population density, mosquito distribution, and public health. They will also incorporate structured and unstructured data from community networks, teaching and research institutions, and state government entities. The models will reveal interdependent relationships and interactions, including spatial correlations between the arboviral diseases over time. They will develop distinct models for individual geographic regions to serve as early warning systems for arboviral disease outbreaks and to guide local interventions.

This grant is funded by Grand Challenges Brazil.

Hernan Argibay of Fiocruz in Brazil will support a participatory research approach for communities in urban slums in Salvador, Brazil to develop and monitor the impact of interventions to reduce the risk of vector-borne and zoonotic diseases. Guided by local needs, new community-led projects will focus on environmentally transmitted diseases (e.g., leptospirosis and enteric infections) and vector-borne diseases (e.g., leishmaniasis, rickettsiosis, and those caused by the arboviruses dengue, chikungunya, and Zika), all of whom could increase in incidence due to climate change. Intervention projects will include environmental clean-up to reduce disease transmission by mosquitos and rats, planting to improve drainage and provide additional food sources, and using an app to map potential risk factors and guide new projects. They will measure intervention impact, including community-led pathogen surveillance using vector traps, water sampling, and metagenomic sequencing.

This grant is funded by Grand Challenges Brazil.

Andréia Santo of the Associação Redes de Desenvolvimento da Maré in Brazil will collect temperature, humidity, and air quality data together with associated health data for residents in the Maré favelas in Rio de Janeiro to better understand the causes of respiratory diseases and reduce their burden. They will also train high school girls as citizen scientists to work alongside health professionals in collecting and analyzing data and developing practical technologies to mitigate the health effects of heat and poor air quality. This participatory science approach will serve as a sustainable mechanism to understand the impacts of climate change on the health of particularly vulnerable communities in Brazil and to guide the development of innovative solutions. In selected residences in Maré, they will pilot an intervention consisting of a bio-concrete wall coating to reduce indoor relative humidity as a cause of heat stress for occupants.

This grant is funded by Grand Challenges Brazil.

Roman Thibeaux of the Institut Pasteur de Nouvelle Calédonie in New Caledonia will examine how climate-driven soil changes and societal and behavioral factors can affect the incidence of leptospirosis to develop community-centered prevention strategies. The causal agent of the disease is the bacterium Leptospira, which can be found in water or soil contaminated with the urine of infected animals and thus can spread following heavy rainfall. Leptospirosis is endemic in the New Caledonia archipelago in the South Pacific, with potential climate-driven increases in incidence. Using soil microcosms in the laboratory, they will explore the effects of temperature, rainfall, and soil structure on Leptospira survival and dispersion. Through interviews and focus groups with New Caledonia community members together with ethnographic fieldwork, they will record local perceptions and knowledge relevant to leptospirosis and its transmission. In partnership with local community members and health authorities, they will then identify sustainable strategies to reduce leptospirosis incidence.

This grant is funded by the Pasteur Network.

Monika Shukla of Buzzworthy Ventures Private Limited in India will establish a women-led beekeeping network in India to enhance crop yields through bee pollination and improve women's livelihoods. The network will be established initially in one climate zone with a known array of crops. They will educate women about bee pollination for agriculture and provide hands-on training in scientific methods of beekeeping. They will provide multiple types of support for the network, including guidance on integrating weather information to determine optimal times for harvesting honey and deploying bees for pollination, advice on running a beekeeping business, and access to an AI-based app for advice on beehive management. They will also create a community center serving the network with educational programs and as a central site for warehousing honey and processing hive products.

Provat Saha of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Bangladesh will support women-led, rural agricultural microenterprises in Bangladesh in deploying a set of climate-smart technologies to enhance their productivity and resilience to climate change. They will engage microenterprises distributed across three sectors: vegetable cultivation, fish farming, and poultry production. They will provide each with a system for user-friendly access to weather forecasts based on international weather models. Each will also receive a cost-effective system for real-time weather monitoring, consisting of a micro-weather station along with relevant sensors, such as soil moisture meters for crops, dissolved oxygen sensors for fisheries, and ammonia and light-intensity sensors for poultry farms. They will provide technical training and guidelines on using the technologies to improve farming decisions, and they will monitor outcomes, including reductions in time, labor, and costs.

Rashima Kazal of the Association of Voluntary Actions for Society in Bangladesh will support women smallholder farmers in the southern and southwestern coastal areas of Bangladesh to improve their livelihoods and enhance their resilience to climate change. They will form and strengthen self-help groups of women farmers, providing seed money to scale-up new ideas they generate on topics such as labor-saving technologies, climate-smart tools, and digital marketing. They will provide training for the groups, including on managing livestock, preventing crop failure, and ensuring family nutrition through low-cost, short-term agricultural production and through food processing techniques that enable year-round nutrition. They will also facilitate communication between rural women's groups and relevant government ministries, committees, and policymakers, so that the perspectives of rural women farmers can be integrated into climate adaptation policies and decisions.

David Chiawo of Strathmore University in Kenya will develop an integrated approach that empowers women smallholder farmers in the Mount Kenya region to improve their livelihoods and adapt to climate change. The approach combines avocado cultivation, beekeeping for honey production, and bean farming. This integration will help women farmers optimize their limited land resources and diversify their income sources, with nitrogen fixation by beans improving soil fertility and increased pollination of avocado trees enhancing yield. The approach includes technology for digital tracking of avocados from farm to market, supporting product traceability and consumer trust to increase attractiveness for the export market. They will also establish a women-led aggregator system for farmers to pool their produce, negotiate better prices, and access larger markets more efficiently.

Emery Metelo of the Institut National pour la Recherche Biomedicale in the Democratic Republic of the Congo will test implementation by women and youth community members of a mosquito vector control program to reduce the burden of disease caused by Aedes-borne arboviruses. The program will be guided by local health authorities and the network of community health workers. It will be implemented over 15 months in two areas of the city of Kinshasa, and it will consist of community education and training of participants, followed by mosquito trapping and clearing of potential habitats for mosquito larvae. They will assess the program's effectiveness by comparing data before and after the intervention, including an arbovirus serosurvey covering dengue, chikungunya, Zika, and yellow fever, and an entomological survey of mosquitos and their larvae. They will also assess changes in relevant behaviors, knowledge, and perceptions due to community participation in the program.

Bastien Linol of Nelson Mandela University in South Africa will develop a platform for crowd-sourced monitoring of surface water and groundwater by local communities in rural areas of South Africa, Ghana, and Kenya. Through collaboration across the three countries, the platform will enable geoscientists to work together with local communities to characterize the availability and quality of water sources. The research teams will train local community members as citizen scientists to collect information on water sources and take weekly samples, with data entered into a mobile application. Together with geochemical analysis of the samples, the data will be entered into a database with an interactive website for user-friendly geographic analysis and reporting back to communities. This platform for participatory science will empower local communities to make recommendations to governmental water and sanitation agencies, helping solve the water-related challenges posed by climate change.

Edita Magileviciute of the Caboverdean Ecotourism Association in Cape Verde will explore the potential of locally harvested seaweed as a biofertilizer to support rural women's livelihoods and agricultural development in Cape Verde. After women-led hand-harvesting, Sargassum and Ulva seaweed will be processed and tested for use as a safe and effective compost for vegetable crops. Testing will be in collaboration with local stakeholders and the University of York in the United Kingdom, who have assessed seaweed products in Jamaica. They will also explore dried Sargassum seaweed combined with recycled glass and plastic for production of building bricks, as well as Ulva seaweed as a food or additive to cosmetics. These seaweed-based products would provide new business opportunities for rural women, while contributing to rural agricultural development.

Richa Verma of Siddhi Vinayak Agri Processing Private Limited in India will support women entrepreneurs and women-led Farmer Producer Organizations in adopting climate-resilient potato varieties through a pilot program in four states in India. They will collaborate with Friends for Women's World Banking to support farmers' access to financial services and guidance on marketing, and they will collaborate with Agrico (Netherlands) to support decisions on potato varieties. The pilot program will be established in the states of Uttar Pradesh, Assam, Bengal, and Gujarat. They will provide training and support that broadly encompasses the business of potato farming, ranging from marketing climate-resilient seed varieties to drone-based spraying of crops to post-harvest processes that add to the agricultural value chain.

Alexandre ten Caten of the Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina with the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil will pilot test an affordable field-based system for measuring biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) to guide BNF-based strategies to improve crop production. They will test their system in a field experiment including crops grown with either of two treatments: nitrogen-capturing microorganisms applied to seeds or nitrogen-fixing legumes grown with the crop. They will then assess BNF, comparing measurement of nitrogen isotopes by mass spectrometry as the benchmark to spectral measurements with more affordable spectrometers. They will use machine learning to integrate data from spectral analysis of soil with that of plant leaves to generate a model, which could be incorporated into a mobile app, for more accurate BNF monitoring. They will also develop an RNA-based diagnostic test to identify plant genotypes more responsive to nitrogen-fixing bacteria. These tools would enable agricultural extension workers and farmers to independently monitor new BNF-based strategies.

Junaid Iqbal of Aga Khan University in Pakistan will test the effects of daily supplemental feeding for women in rural Pakistan to mitigate the negative effects of heat stress during pregnancy on maternal and neonatal health outcomes. They will enroll 250 women, comparing pregnancy in the summer and winter and with and without daily supplemental feeding in the first trimester. The supplemental food will be designed for increased nutritional value, based on ingredients from local diets. They will measure a variety of clinical outcomes in mother and child, including maternal ultrasound measurements and newborn anthropometry. To explore potential mechanisms underlying the effects of heat stress and their potential mitigation by supplemental feeding, they will also use maternal samples taken at the time of delivery to assess serum micronutrients, the gut microbiome, and the placental transcriptome.

Santu Ghosh of the St John's Research Institute in India will explore the effects of heat stress on lactation and infant growth, including their potential mitigation by a nutritional supplement for breastfeeding mothers in India. They will enroll two cohorts of 65 women in the state of Tamal Nadu, comparing data for breastfeeding in the summer versus the winter. They will measure breast milk quantity and quality, an oxidative stress marker in maternal blood, iron nutritional status in mother and infant, and infant growth. To test the hypothesis that heat stress causes harm via oxidative stress in mothers, they will assess the potential benefit of giving a subset of the breastfeeding mothers an omega 3-fatty acid nutritional supplement as an antioxidant. The results could guide simple strategies based on diet or nutritional supplementation to mitigate the effects of heat stress on the health of pregnant and lactating women.

Cleo Conacher of Stellenbosch University in South Africa will develop a surveillance and risk prediction system for the presence of Candida pathogens in river water sources used by informal settlements in South Africa. This system will account for climate change-influenced environmental factors that can affect the prevalence, distribution, and behavior of these fungal pathogens. They will survey community members for data on river water exposure. They will also design a sampling device to collect data on river water properties as well as microbiological samples for data on Candida pathogen prevalence and gene expression. They will combine this data to enhance an existing framework for microbial risk assessment and to develop an AI-based model that predicts fungal infection risk from environmental trends. They will communicate the risk estimates and overall conclusions to community members through meetings and a project website, with materials translated into relevant local languages.

Maria Jones of UN Women (India Country Office) in India with Umang Agarwal of GROW Indigo and Sudarshan Thakur of PRADAN, both in India will develop a sensor to measure biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) and provide it together with access to biofertilizers to women small-scale producers in India as a model of gender-intentional agricultural innovation. They will develop a low-cost sensor for real-time measurement of BNF in the field. They will conduct field trials with the sensor, using the data to generate a model that incorporates satellite imagery data to estimate BNF, and then validate the model with mass spectrometry data from the field trial. They will pilot test the sensor plus access to biofertilizers and training on complementary climate-smart agricultural practices with women small-scale producers in the state of Madhya Pradesh in India. This package of support could lead to improved soil health and crop productivity, increasing income as well as resilience to climate change.

Ousmane Sy of the Universite Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar in Senegal will develop mathematical and AI-based models to predict the impact of climate change on malaria morbidity, mortality, and transmission by the Anopheles gambiae species complex in Senegal. They will use epidemiological, environmental, and entomological data from the last 20 years in northern and central Senegal to predict the future of the disease in these areas. The models will incorporate the effects of interventions for malaria control being used in Senegal, including long-lasting insecticidal nets, indoor residual spraying with insecticides, and seasonal chemoprevention. The project's interdisciplinary approach will support the National Malaria Control Program, while building and strengthening collaborations for malaria modeling.

Blaise Bougnom of the Centre for Research in Infectious Diseases in Cameroon will develop models to predict the impact of climate change on the spread of clinically relevant, drug-resistant bacteria in maternity wards in Cameroon and Burkina Faso to enhance public health preparedness. The models will integrate climate data with data from hospitals across different climate zones in the two countries, enabled by a partnership with the University of Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso. They will collect and sequence bacterial samples from these hospitals, while also performing environmental monitoring in them. They will then collect historical and projected climate data for the relevant areas of the countries, using it to develop models that predict transmission of drug-resistant bacterial strains. Using the models, they will design targeted interventions, such as enhanced hygiene protocols, pilot testing them in hospitals to improve maternal and neonatal health outcomes.

Diana Karanja of COHESU in Kenya will develop a community health information system to reduce the burden of schistosomiasis in Kenya. They will implement the project in persistent hotspot areas of schistosomiasis near Lake Victoria. They will perform surveys to assess women's decision-making power in the household and how this correlates with schistosomiasis health outcomes for them and their families. The results will be used to inform communication strategies that improve these health outcomes. They will also train community healthcare providers to collect information on use of local water sources as a risk factor for water-borne transmission of the schistosomiasis parasite. This information will be integrated into existing predictive models of risk that will be used to develop an app. The app will provide simple messages and alerts, including information tailored based on the household surveys as well as seasonal updates on schistosomiasis risk.

Kenneth Odhiambo of the University of Eldoret in Kenya will support the design and implementation of scalable, climate-smart, labor-saving agricultural practices and technologies to improve women's livelihoods in drylands of three counties in Kenya. These practices, depending on the county, will focus on beekeeping and production of poultry, fruit, sorghum, groundnuts, and cowpeas, as well as rice paddy fish farming where feasible. The approach will be co-designed by the intended beneficiaries. The set of technologies will include new mechanisms for water harvesting and automated solar-powered irrigation systems. Farming practices will be introduced to increase food and nutrition security as well as for higher and more stable income.

Celestina Innih of Kogi State Fadama Coordination Office in Nigeria with Cynthia Nwobodo of University of Nigeria Nsukka also in Nigeria will develop advisory services for rural women in Nigeria to make informed decisions for climate change adaptation. This includes providing women, youth, and agricultural extension workers with access to information on climate-smart practices. It also includes access to timely weather information to guide planning of farming calendars, which will be done in partnership with the Nigeria Meteorological Agency. A gender perspective on climate-smart practices will be sustainably incorporated through creation of women's groups on the topic in the agricultural zones of two states in Nigeria. The project will implement a variety of relevant training sessions, workshops, and field demonstrations, as well as producing a training manual on soil and crop management practices for climate change adaptation.

Devotha Nyambo of the Nelson Mandela African Institute of Science and Technology in Tanzania will develop AI-based predictive models as an early warning system for vector-borne diseases, integrating community-based information gathering and vector control and focusing on malaria and dengue in areas of Tanzania particularly vulnerable to climate change. They will develop the models using topographic data from satellite images, historical climate and weather data, and vector-borne disease data sets. They will train women and youth to identify and eliminate mosquito breeding sites and larvae, and they will create user-friendly interfaces for this observational data to be reported and integrated into the predictive models. The early warning system, enhanced by direct engagement and education of community members, will guide effective strategies to mitigate the impact of vector-borne diseases.

Muhammed Semakula of the Rwanda Ministry of Health in Rwanda will establish an integrated data system with analytical tools to monitor and predict the effects of climate change on public health in Rwanda. The focus will be to understand the impact of temperature, rainfall, and air pollution on the top five causes of mortality: cardiovascular, diarrheal, and respiratory diseases; malnutrition; and accidents and injuries. After establishing a database of historical and current data, they will develop statistical models to assess the short- and long-term effects of climate on health. They will also launch a publicly accessible dashboard for real-time monitoring of these effects and develop educational materials and workshops on the topic. This combination of approaches will inform and engage the public while building and supporting a research community for a sustainable response to climate change.

Khamsing Vongphayloth of Institut Pasteur du Laos in Lao PDR will develop a surveillance program for ticks and tick-borne pathogens to model and predict the transmission dynamics of tick-borne diseases. They will perform sampling at two sites in the northern region of Lao PDR suitable to monitor the effects of climate change. Over two years, they will collect ticks and other ectoparasites from host animals as well as free-living ticks, sampling across multiple seasons each year. Ticks will be screened by PCR for two viruses (Severe Fever with Thrombocytopenia Syndrome Virus and tick-borne encephalitis virus) and for spotted fever group rickettsiae, which are intracellular bacteria. Corresponding weather data will be collected along with land use data from direct and satellite observation. This monitoring data will help predict climate-driven changes in the risk of human exposure to tick-borne pathogens and support the development of a country-wide and regional surveillance system.

This grant is funded by the Pasteur Network.

Manda Kumari Karn of the Janaki Women Awareness Society in Nepal will support women farmers in Nepal to incorporate labor-saving technologies and non-agricultural sources of income and to participate in community-based responses to climate change. For 100 households dependent on subsistence agriculture in the Dhanusha district, they will provide training to establish climate-smart, labor-saving agricultural systems, including solar-powered water systems. Women in these households will receive support in creating micro-enterprises that reduce their dependence on agriculture, including needs-based training and business coaching. They will also bring together women farmers and entrepreneurs to support their participation in developing local action plans for climate change response.

Mahadia Tunga of the Tanzania Data Lab in Tanzania will support women and youth running small and medium enterprises to integrate current information on climate change, enabling them to make data-driven decisions for more sustainable agricultural practices in Tanzania. After assessing the local needs for this information by relevant enterprises, they will design and implement training programs, including through on-line materials and in-person workshops. They will also create an accelerator program to identify and support new enterprises with a focus on climate adaptation strategies. This set of support will engage women and youth, building a community around navigating the challenges of climate change in Tanzania and piloting a model of support that could be replicated more broadly.

Martin Tarkpor of the Liberia Institute for Development Assessment and Research in Liberia will pilot test a battery rental system for women agricultural cooperatives to use to power their food processing equipment and sustainably increase their productivity and incomes. Food processing, such as rice threshing and milling and palm kernel pressing, is typically done using equipment operated manually or with a generator. Pay-as-you-go battery rental systems are a rapidly growing alternative to provide affordable, clean power to low-income communities off the power grid. Batteries are charged at solar charging stations and then rented directly there or distributed through agents. They will perform field trials in Liberia and then Sierra Leone, testing the battery rental system at six cooperatives and at different times in the growing season to encompass multiple crops. Based on the trials, they will develop a simple business model to facilitate rolling out the battery system more broadly in sub-Saharan African countries.

Daniel Oulai of Grainothèque in Cote d'Ivoire will support women farmers in the Tonkpi region of Cote d'Ivoire to improve their livelihoods through rice-fish farming. Rice-fish farming is a mutually beneficial combination of agriculture with aquaculture simultaneously in the same fields. They will train women farmers in setting up and managing rice-fish farming, including matching farmers to the most suitable land and providing them with a mobile phone-based alert system to get information on the agricultural calendar and weather. They will provide business training, including for marketing their rice product and for setting up village savings and loan associations. They will also hold community meetings to involve the families of the women farmers and raise awareness about how the farming program reduces gender inequalities in a way that benefits the economic empowerment of the entire community.

Patricia Bamanyaki of the African Group of Negotiators Experts Support in Kenya will generate sex-disaggregated data and information together with platforms and tools to increase the resilience of women and youth to the challenges posed by climate change to agriculture and health in Kenya and Ethiopia. They will collect and integrate data from diverse sources to identify geographic hotspots in the two countries where women and youth are particularly vulnerable to climate change due to the overlap of risks associated with gender inequality, vector-borne diseases, and agricultural losses. This data will be made accessible and usable by stakeholders inside and outside government. They will also establish hubs at the regional level in each country that foster collaborative action between policymakers and agricultural and health practitioners to support women, youth, and marginalized groups in the face of climate change.

Cecilia Limera of the African Agricultural Technology Foundation in Kenya will develop a platform to convert weather information into practical recommendations that support data-driven, rice crop management in Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal and Ghana. The platform will complement existing weather information systems and serve to boost rice production by women- and youth-run MSMEs, improving the livelihoods of rice farmers. They will co-create the platform with MSMEs in the four countries after identifying their needs and climate change-related challenges. The platform will integrate satellite data with weather data from a network of weather stations and sensors. It will analyze this data, including customizable AI-based modeling, to provide climate-smart guidance to optimize rice production. This guidance will be accessible through user-friendly mobile and web-based formats.

Innocent Mbulli Ali of the University of Dschang in Cameroon will develop an AI-based forecasting system to guide the delivery of seasonal malaria chemoprevention in Northern Cameroon. The system will build on an existing AI-based model and incorporate historical environmental, epidemiological, and mosquito vector surveillance data from relevant regions of Cameroon. They will train the model to predict changes in malaria morbidity and mortality due to extreme weather events, including the timing, peak number, and distribution of malaria cases. They will collaborate with the National Malaria Control Program to test the system as a tool for optimizing the timing of malaria interventions in different health districts, evaluating its prediction accuracy and cost effectiveness.

Maria Qambayot of the University of Global Health Equity in Rwanda will develop a set of mechanisms for engaging local health professionals and communities in data collection and real-time assessment of the health impacts of climate change to support data-driven adaptation strategies. They will conduct household surveys to better understand the vulnerabilities of communities most at risk for these impacts. They will interview health professionals to better understand how they track these impacts and what types of data and information they currently lack. They will also collect 10 years of historical environmental and health data to identify potential patterns and trends linking public health to climate change. These efforts will guide the creation of data collection tools for ongoing community-based assessment as well as a framework for measurement and evaluation of strategies for climate change adaptation.

Didier Ntwali of the Rwanda Space Agency in Rwanda will develop and implement an integrated early warning and response system for climate-related diseases and other health challenges. They will collect historical data encompassing meteorological data from satellites and ground-based instruments, air pollution data from satellites, and health data from Rwandan organizations and the World Health Organization. Using this data, they will identify key diseases likely to be associated with climate change, including vector-borne, water-borne, and respiratory diseases. They will analyze the spatial and temporal distribution of these diseases and develop predictive models as the basis for an early warning system. The models will guide the design of interventions to minimize the impact of climate change on health as well as the design of mechanisms for real-time communication of risks to those most vulnerable.

Mawuli Dzodzomenyo of the University of Ghana School of Public Health in Ghana will use a human-centered design approach to develop an AI-based early warning system to support communities in Ghana prepare for climate change-related risks to maternal and newborn health. They will develop a machine learning model that integrates climate and public health data to identify patterns relevant for maternal and newborn health. They will then use a human-centered design approach to engage community healthcare workers and women's groups in workshops, choosing communities in two distinct ecological zones in Ghana to encompass a range of climate change issues. The initial modeling results will be presented at the workshops, with participants providing feedback to shape the model into a prototype early warning system most suitable to their needs and concerns.

Catherine Mériaux of the University of Rwanda in Rwanda will characterize and model how the volcanic environment in western Rwanda affects health in the face of climate change. Volcanic activity impacts health through emissions that contribute to respiratory diseases, through irritant soil particles that are implicated in podoconiosis (also known as non-filarial elephantiasis), and through unstable land features that cause catastrophic landslides. All these impacts can be increased by climate change-driven effects on air and soil. To guide mitigating strategies, the research team will deploy a range of environmental science approaches. This will include air and soil analysis to better understand the cause of podoconiosis, integrating satellite and weather data to model the dispersion and deposition of volcanic emissions, and modeling the effects of terrain on previous landslides.

Dyness Kejo of the Tanzania Food and Nutrition Center in Tanzania will develop an affordable, ready-to-use therapeutic food based on amaranth to treat malnutrition in children in Tanzania. Amaranth is a nutritious, high-yielding, and drought-tolerant crop. They will optimize the recipe for an amaranth-based therapeutic food as a substitute for those based on nuts, and then validate the product's nutritional content and safety. They will establish farm demonstration plots of the relevant amaranth variety and plan nutrition education programs and campaigns. They will also develop training to support women and youth in setting up horticulture-based businesses, including for the amaranth product.

Mesfin Gemeda of Addis Ababa Science and Technology University in Ethiopia with Essential in Kenya will develop a process for fermenting agricultural byproducts to generate low-cost, high-quality proteins for products to treat and prevent malnutrition. They will develop the process, including identifying relevant microbes and designing the fermentation process and subsequent processing, while developing a plan for increasing the scale of production and ensuring effective integration of the protein into relevant products. The project will help demonstrate the broad potential of fermentation for climate-resilient protein production across low- and middle-income countries.

Thomas Torora of Arba Minch University in Ethiopia will use AI-based approaches to downscale coarse-resolution climate simulations and integrate kebele-level (subdistrict) malaria data to predict malaria incidence at a finer scale in Ethiopia to proactively guide targeted interventions. To predict malaria incidence under current and future climate scenarios, they will develop AI-based models that integrate meteorological data from surface and satellite observations, seasonal climate forecasts, land use and satellite vegetation-index datasets, and malaria data from health facilities. They will validate the models using malaria and mosquito vector data from selected sites. They will also develop a web-based interactive tool to make the malaria predictions readily accessible to public health officials, policymakers, and community stakeholders.

Fiseha Wadilo of Armauer Hansen Research Institute in Ethiopia will develop a machine learning model that integrates meteorological and air pollution data with public health data to predict the occurrence of respiratory diseases, enhancing the existing surveillance system in Ethiopia. Meteorological data will encompass seasonal variation in temperature, precipitation, and humidity. Public health data will include information from hospital visits and admissions for respiratory diseases in health facilities in Addis Ababa. The predictive model will serve to better identify the underlying risk factors for respiratory diseases, while helping predict their occurrence to guide preventive measures. The model will be integrated into the existing surveillance system in Ethiopia for influenza-like illnesses and severe acute respiratory infections.