Director General of Rwanda Meteorology Agency, stakeholders from MIDIMAR, RAB, RWFA, Tumba College of Technology, Kayonza District and many other institutions, colleagues from the One UN family, all protocols observed, Ladies and Gentlemen,

Waramutse, good morning.

On behalf of Stephen Rodriques, UNDP Country Director, I would like to greet you all, and first express my appreciation for participating in this important Partnership Meeting. Climate-data informed disaster risk management and planning is one of the priorities for Rwanda in National Strategy for Transformation (NST) and for UNDP for achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). The diversity of participants, indicated by stakeholders and experts from various institutions, creates a synergistic effect in the discussions of climate information.

I have been following this project on Twitter, and would like to congratulate you all on the great work done so far. I saw that the Hackathon in Kayonza brought together talented teams of engineers, and created potential solutions to the most important gaps in the flow of data and information. In the previous Design-a-thon, I had the pleasure of serving as jury. It is impressive to see that some of their ideas are now fully tested and developed. It is so inspiring to see the youth utilize their creativity and tangible skills to develop products that are meaningful and can improve the community and country as a whole.

The project ‘Internet of Things for Climate’ was funded initially by the UNDP Innovation Facility and then by Noreps, a Norway Innovation Fund. While this phase is almost coming to an end, we are looking forward to the scale up of the findings and prototypes that have been developed. I am sure today’s discussion will bring in good ideas and priorities to keep mobilizing resources and keep up the innovative works. Some of the findings of this project have already been mainstreamed into a new 5 years programme with Meteo and MIDIMAR, and we look forward to keep working on the eminent issue of climate information for early warning.

I would like to thank Meteo, starting with the strong leadership of DG and the Division Managers, as well as the collaboration of each and every one of the technical staff who have been working together. Also a warm appreciation to the stakeholders, as this project was blessed with unusual level of strong and good engagement of the technical team put together from stakeholder institutions, throughout the project.

I would also like to express special thanks to those who acted as mentors over the weekend. From respective stakeholder institutions - may I ask them to stand up?-- MIDIMAR (Elisabeth & Jean), RAB (Aimable & Crispin), RWFA (Davis), TCT (Professor Raymond), RISA (Rene & Christelle)and Meteo (Floribert & Serge)– – and the consultants from Impact Hub Kigali (Mafer, Casey, Cares, Alejandro, Jon), regional guests Gilbert from TAHMO and Prince from KUMASI HIVE, and also the other facilitators who are here with us today – for the strong engagement, and the huge effort you put in preparation and to mentor the Hackers over the weekend. We cannot appreciate you more. Please join me to give them a warm round of applause.

I wish you all a fruitful meeting and wonderful pitch competition today.

Thank you.