Dr. Jackson Efitre is a Senior Lecturer at Makerere University, Uganda. He has extensive experience in areas of fisheries and aquaculture, food and nutrition, capacity building and climate change, spanning over 20 years. He was Co-Investigator on the “Equipping Small Scale Fishers and Riparian Communities with Adaptation Strategies to Cope with Impacts of Climate Variability and Change” and “Integrating Hydroclimate Science into Policy Decisions for Climate-Resilient Infrastructure and Livelihoods in East Africa (HyCRISTAL)” projects. Dr. Efitre has published and co-authored a number of articles, book chapters and training manuals on climate change and presented at several national, regional and international climate change conferences. His poster on “Mainstreaming climate change into fisheries and aquatic sciences curriculum and training in tertiary academic institutions in Africa” received the best presentation award from the World Climate Change Research Programme (WCRP) during the Africa climate change Conference in Arusha, Tanzania in 2013. In 2017, he was a Fellow of the prestigious Rockefeller Foundation Academic Writing working on “Integrating Climate Science into Strategies for Climate-Smart Fisheries and Livelihoods (CSFL)”. He has also been engaged in international initiatives including serving on the Editorial Advisory Board of the International Journal of Climate Change Strategies and Management and as a member of the Coordination Team for Climate Research for Development in Africa (CR4D). Dr. Efitre was as Lead Author Chapter 9: Africa, Working Groups II of the 6th Assessment Report (AR6) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) focusing on freshwater ecosystems and Food systems.
2023 Climate and Forests Technical Advisory Panel
We establish an independent Technical Advisory Panel (TAP) for each Request for Proposals (RFP). TAP members bring strong technical and domain knowledge, and are responsible for identifying data gaps, refining RFPs, and reviewing and selecting proposals for funding. They also outline insights from the funding process and make recommendations for future funding considerations.
Darlington Akogo
karaAgro AI
About Darlington Akogo
Jackson Efitre
Makerere University
About Jackson Efitre
Meryl Cohen
Amazon Conservation
About Meryl Cohen
Meryl is the Programs Director at Amazon Conservation, an Alliance of three organizations that addresses urgent conservation challenges related to forests, water, and climate through the use of science and the latest technology in Peru and Bolivia, as well as partnering with local NGOs across the greater Amazon region.
She leads Amazon Conservation’s partnership development to address the growing threats facing the Amazon rainforest. Previously, Meryl developed and implemented rights-based conservation strategies across the Amazon and Mesoamerica with Forest Trends and the Rights and Resources Initiative. Prior to that, she supported Rapid Assessment Projects in Peru to quantify species diversity with Conservation International. Meryl has a Master’s in International Development and an undergraduate degree in Political Science from the University of Pittsburgh. Her areas of expertise include cross-cutting holistic conservation and development issues, specifically land tenure, sustainable livelihoods, Indigenous Peoples’ rights and indigenous territorial designations, conservation protected areas, and climate/REDD+ finance.
Praveen Mokkapati
NASSCOM
About Praveen Mokkapati
Praveen Mokkapati is Deputy Director (AI) at NASSCOM, the premium apex body that represents India’s $227B IT/ITeS/BPM industry. He operates the Telangana AI Mission (T-AIM) with the objective of leading the Indian state of Telangana into a global innovation hub for Artificial Intelligence. Praveen is a senior executive with 15+ years of business & research experience in the USA, Europe, Southeast Asia, and India. He’s worked with governments, venture capital, tech startups, industry, universities, and non-governmental institutions, at a strategic and operational level, to scale technology innovations.
Rebecca Ryakitimbo
Mozilla Foundation
About Rebecca Ryakitimbo
Rebecca is a techie, writer and researcher. She is currently a community engagement fellow at Mozilla, working towards building an open voice dataset in Kiswahili to promote voice technology. She is working on establishing and supporting diverse Kiswahili language and tech communities along axes of gender, age, regional origin, accent and vernacular usage towards building an open voice dataset in Kiswahili. Before joining Mozilla, Rebecca has been an Internet Society fellow, an Afrisig fellow, a Google Policy fellow, a national geographic explorer and a digital rights program officer at Paradigm Initiative. Rebecca is an enthusiast of digital inclusion and the founder of the first women SIG “Arusha women school of Internet governance” .
Swetha Kolluri
UNDP India
About Swetha Kolluri
Swetha is a Data Scientist and Rural Development professional with more than 14 years of professional experience in India and USA. Her work encompasses diverse fields like sustainable agriculture, poverty alleviation, air pollution, climate change and digital technologies. She has worked with organizations ranging from village-level community institutions to national think-tanks and research labs in both India and USA. She has authored one book and five research publications. She is also founding member of a social enterprise connecting rural youth to jobs in South and Central India.
As Head of Experimentation at UNDP in India, she leads the design of innovative experiments for SDGs and tests them to inform the development ecosystem on ‘what works and what doesn’t’. She is passionate about designing transformative social and environmental innovations using emerging technologies. With innovative use of artificial intelligence, citizen science, digital public goods and data collaboratives, Swetha has curated unique digital platforms such as GeoAI to combat air pollution and digital public goods like DiCRA for climate resilient agriculture.
Swetha is a Fulbright-Nehru scholar and environmental management graduate from Yale University. She is also an Electronics Engineer from JNTU Hyderabad and graduate from the Institute of Rural Management Anand (IRMA). Swetha is an avid reader and enjoys trekking in Himalayas in her free time. She considers her 18 month stay in remote areas of Nagarjuna Sagar Tiger Reserve Forest working for Particularly Vulnerable Tribal Groups PVTG Chenchu, as a unique life experience.
Tara O'Shea
Planet Labs, Public Benefit Corporation
About Tara O'Shea
Tara is passionate about realigning natural and human systems to forge more sustainable models of economic development, and has worked across the academic, nonprofit, finance and technology sectors towards this end. As the Senior Director of Forests & Land Use at Planet, she oversees the company’s strategy for leveraging its Earth observation and analytics technologies to improve global forest monitoring systems today, and account for the value of forests (and true costs of unsustainable land use) in the global economy tomorrow. In her spare time, she loves to read, trail run, and ski.
Vishwas Chitale
GIZ India
About Vishwas Chitale
Dr. Vishwas Chitale, Advisor-Artificial Intelligence Program, GIZ India has been working for over 13 years in different countries in Asia in the broad domain of climate action and resilience building. He is a nature lover who enjoys being close to nature and to understand better how our work can reverse the trend of climate impacts.