Despite the need for, and value of, African biodiversity information, fewer than 4% of the total species occurrence records that have been published through the Global Biodiversity Information Facility, GBIF, are of African flora and fauna. Thus, African species, which represent one-fifth of the world’s mammal and one-quarter of the world’s bird species, are dramatically underrepresented. Moreover, most of the records of African occurrences have been published by non-African institutions. The lack of data-sharing in Africa is often attributed to insufficient capacity and weak incentives. Likewise, the weak political traction that biodiversity informatics commands, and the resulting low funding it receives, have been linked to difficulty in communicating the benefits of biodiversity data publishing.

This project will address these obstacles and opportunities with the African Biodiversity Challenge (ABC), which will seek to capacitate and incentivize African countries to mobilize biodiversity data in support of sustainable development. A prior phase of this project, which attempted to stimulate 16 countries to mobilize data and to develop national data sharing platforms, experienced limited success because the geographic, cultural, and political contexts were too numerous and varied to accommodate in a single effort. In response, this project narrows its focus to three countries, and draws on new tools to generate incentive and build capacity, namely, a cash prize for the country that makes the greatest progress in data mobilization, and more in-country training and investment to enable participants to succeed. In making these changes, SANBI hopes to have a more substantial impact in a smaller number of countries that will inspire other countries to follow suit, and to provide technical regional technical capacity for institutional data sharing.

The African Biodiversity Challenge (ABC) is a competitive training opportunity that will enhance the capacity of three African countries to manage and share biodiversity data, by providing each with an intensive individualized training program. Project objectives are to:

1. Identify and engage strategic partners in 3 African countries. From a pool of preselected applicants, the project will choose and solidify partnerships with 3 countries to participate in the ABC. By convening partners in each of the ABC countries, the project will contextualize the individual challenges of publishing biodiversity data in each, as well as the lessons learned in surmounting obstacles common to all.
2. Identify data mobilization priorities in each ABC country and develop individualized data mobilization roadmaps. The project will support the capability of each country to carry out plans by providing customized training and support from informatics specialists.
3. Incent roadmap implementation through a competition for a monetary prize among ABC countries for greatest number of published species occurrence records (US$30,000 for first, US$20,000 for second, and US$10,000 for third place).
4. Leverage additional resources to support continued data mobilization.
5. Facilitate knowledge exchange by publicizing data and growth of national biodiversity informatics capacity.

• Publication of 60,000+ species occurrence records through GBIF
• Publicity and cash prizes for countries with most records published
• Training in data mobilization for 15 individual partners (5 from each participant country)
• Publication of 3 project webpages
• Presentations at 5+ conferences
• Submission of 3 funding proposals (1 from each participant country) to sustain data mobilization efforts beyond scope of the challenge.

Conservation outcomes will include increased availability of relevant, high-quality biodiversity information to facilitate research, planning, and decision-making processes by scientists, civil servants, and policymakers. Though the direct involvement of the project will be limited to the three countries actively participating in the challenge, the project could serve to inspire other African countries to follow suit, thereby catalyzing growth in data sharing on the continent. It is also expected that the momentum generated during the challenge will motivate participant countries to continue data mobilization efforts on their own well into the future.  The roadmaps developed by each country should provide models for other countries to emulate and for a potential future round of funding.

• Teams from four countries, Rwanda, Ghana, Malawi, and Namibia, were selected to compete in the African Biodiversity Challenge. The selected proposals were chosen from over 40 initial applications, spanning 13 countries.
• The African Biodiversity Challenge was officially launched in Kigali, Rwanda from the 30^th of August to the 1^st of September. Overall, 27 participants from the four selected teams, as well as several steering committee members, attended the meeting.
• A total of 71 people attended two trainings hosted at SANBI to learn data management skills, information packaging and mainstreaming skills, and more.
• Four of the Biodiversity Information Management Forums have been completed for Ghana, Namibia, Rwanda, and Malawi. All forums were attended by a ~50:50 split of data holders and end users and co-funded by other organizations.
• The Awards Ceremony was held on 28 March, 2019 in Ghana to recognize the conclusion of the Competition component of the project.
• The teams published a total of 47,644 unique records to GBIF, comprising of data from The teams published a wide variety of data from across all data classes, including 3 resources metadata, 16 checklists, 26 occurrence datasets and 14 sampling-event datasets.
• Ghana, the winners of the competition, published 23,362 data records from a wide variety of useful datasets: Conservation Alliance, on behalf of the Resource Management Support Centre of the Forestry Commission, published 8 datasets comprising fauna and flora data (including invasive alien species) in the Ankasa-Bia-Krokusua ecological corridor (a region of high biodiversity value) and tree species recorded in cocoa plantations.
• Both Conservation Alliance and A Rocha of the Ghana team published data on biodiversity occurring in Community Resource Environment Management Areas (CREMAs)located at Elluokrom and around Mole National Park.
• The Plant Genetic Resources Research Institute (PGRRI) from CSIR of the Ghana team published several important datasets on root and tuber species, legume species and cereal crop wild relative species.
• Winning second place, the team from Malawi published 12,518 records to GBIF from 8,402 digitized specimens from the National Herbarium and Botanic Gardens (NHBG) and Museums of Malawi.
• The historical occurrence data on insects, birds and mammals from the Malawian Team, Department of Museums and Monuments and Wildlife and Environment Society of Malawi, can help to inform national Red List priority assessments for pollinator species in collaboration with a broader project being conducted by the Department of Environmental Affairs.
• Rwanda team has published datasets GBIF through the ARBIMS platform hosted by the Albertine Rift Conservation Society. They mobilized a total of 2,164 freshwater biodiversity data.
• The Centre of Excellence in Biodiversity and Natural Resource Management (CoEB), University of Rwanda published two dataset pertaining to freshwater biodiversity: the first contained occurrence data digitised from student theses, and the second was occurrence data held in inventory reports by the Rwanda Environment Management Authority.
• ARCOS  of the Rwanda team, published sample-event datasets as part of their Integrated Landscapes Assessment and Monitoring (ILAM) programme. These datasets and others will ultimately provide the currency of the freshwater biodiversity information system (FBIS) currently being planned by CoEB as part of a JRS planning grant.
• The Namibian Team populated an existing national data platform, the Environmental Information Service of Namibia, with a large dataset on radio-collared animal movement from Greater Sossusvlei-Namib Landscape association that can help to inform fencing policies and landscape-scale management, as well as several resources metadata (with potential to mobilise c. 240,000 records) from the Ministry of Environment and Tourism documenting aerial surveys conducted on protected areas and community-owned conservancies as well as wildlife utilisation data from hunting permits.
• The Ghana team’s published data has been used by consultants to identify the invasive species Broussoentia papyrifera in the Bosomkese, Pamu Berekum and Goa Shelterbelt forest reserves, and to identify which shade-tree species should be used in cocoa farms to improve ecological health through the BOAME Cocoa Scheme; and CREMA managers have used the data to inform management plans around Mole National Park, particularly in recording indicator species such as the Wild Water Buffalo (Bubalus bubalis), and to support the creation of new CREMAs.
• The Rwanda Team has identified use of the  CoEB thesis dataset in the model of the spread of the invasive species Mexican sunflower (Tithonia diversifolia) on a continental scale (Obiakara MC, Fourcade Y. 2018. Climatic niche and potential distribution of Tithonia diversifolia (Hemsl.) A. Gray in Africa. PLOS ONE 13:e0202421).
• The Malawi ABC team has seen success in partnering with the Environmental Affairs Department (EAD) to host the BIMF. Here, EAD is spearheading the Mapping Biodiversity Priorities project, which seeks to produce a national ecosystem-level assessment.

• SANBI (2015) Africa Rising: Mobilizing Biodiversity Data for Sustainable Development. Official Conference Report. Cape Town, South Africa. (download)

Matthew Child is the Biodiversity Informatics Project Coordinator at the South African National Biodiversity Institute (SANBI). His work entails supporting and incentivizing functional networks between data holders and end users across the continent to enhance the mainstreaming of biodiversity information into policy.

Matthew previously worked at the Endangered Wildlife Trust, South Africa in coordinating the revision of the national Red List of mammals, where he learned valuable lessons in stakeholder engagement and information management. Prior to this, he was involved in the Conservation Evidence project at Cambridge University where he co-authored the first global synopsis of evidence for the effects of bird conservation.

He has published multiple scientific papers and reports, ranging from behavioural ecology to conservation philosophy, and holds an M.Sc from the University of Cape Town and an M.Phil from the Cambridge University. He is currently undertaking a PhD in conservation policy through the Centre for Wildlife Management at the University of Pretoria, which he hopes will help establish systems to make conservation research more relevant to policy.

The prior project directed by SANBI was very successful in working with stakeholders to identify data needs, processes for mobilizing data and building data partnerships, and strengthening professional networks supported by GBIF, JRS, and others.  However, by spreading attention and resources across a large number of countries, no single country was propelled to a new and sustained level of biodiversity data mobilization. The many lessons of that effort have been applied to the design of this project.  More work will be done in partnership with other organizations, stakeholders will be more involved in design and in processes, and resources will be focused on fewer countries.  Prize mechanisms have proven to be valuable tools to motivate innovation and performance and to attract attention to their goals.  We are excited to fund this new and innovative effort and to work with SANBI and other JRS Grantees to support its success.