WACEDIF: West African Climate and Environmental Data and Information Facility

Climate variability and extremes are placing growing pressure on livelihoods, ecosystems, and development across West Africa. Despite advances in regional climate science, major gaps remain due to limited ground-based observation systems, sparse in-situ sensor data, and weak integration of monitoring networks into the tools that decision-makers actually rely on. These constraints hold back the kind of precise, timely information needed for climate-smart agriculture, water management, and disaster risk reduction.

WACEDIF is addressing this challenge by transforming West Africa’s fragmented observation systems into an integrated, citizen-driven, and innovation-powered facility for climate and environmental data. Building on the WASCAL Observation Network (WON), the project harmonizes data from automatic weather stations, low-cost IoT sensors, and citizen-generated observations into a single coherent framework that strengthens research, policy, and sustainable development across the region.

As part of the consortium, WAZIUP e.V. leads the Digital Infrastructure and IoT Development component, contributing its open-source, LoRaWAN-based edge-computing platform to the project. WAZIUP’s technology enables reliable, locally developed IoT sensor networks — covering soil moisture, weather, irrigation, and water-level monitoring — to operate even in areas with limited or no internet connectivity, ensuring continuous data collection in the rural catchments where they are deployed. Building on more than a decade of experience empowering African IoT entrepreneurs, WAZIUP will also support local technical capacity building in IoT integration, edge AI, and sensor maintenance, extending the reach of WACEDIF’s Living Labs and connecting real-time field data to WASCAL’s upgraded data platform (WADI 2.0).

Over 24 months, WACEDIF will upgrade and expand WASCAL’s observatory network, establish rural Living Labs where farmers, cooperatives, and youth and women’s groups co-create climate-smart solutions alongside scientists, and launch training and entrepreneurship programmes to support a new generation of climate-tech start-ups and SMEs.

WACEDIF is led by WASCAL, in partnership with the University of Augsburg and WAZIUP e.V., and in close cooperation with KIT Campus Alpin, with implementation across WASCAL member countries.

This project has received funding from Germany's Federal Ministry of Research, Technology and Space (BMFTR).