Priorities as a partner of the Global Partnership for Sustainable Development Data
IBM is committing $60 million over three years to develop the next generation of technical talent in Africa. As part of the initiative, IBM is expanding the Africa Technical Academy and the company’s Africa University Program to over 20 African countries. IT professionals across the continent are set to benefit with advanced skills in analytics, cloud and big data technologies which are crucial to the next phase of Africa’s economic and social development. IBM plans to train over 1000 teachers in more than 80 universities across Africa and to teach more than 35,000 students by 2017.
IBM through its Academy of Technology commits technical and organizational resources to convene meteorological and social science professionals to work together to create a new Climate Impact Data Model and Repository. This Climate Impact Data Model and Repository will illustrate the impact of subtle and sudden weather events on human behavior, by correlating weather and climate changes to social, economic, health, cultural, and political impacts over time. The Academy, an organization of IBM's top technical professionals and thought leaders, will organize events to convene experts and partners to begin to catalog, in data, how weather and climate changes affect human societies over time. This effort will be designed to help communities prepare for future changes and become more resilient.
IBM will also lead the Open Climate Data Repository Data Collaborative (OCDRC). The OCDRC will provide access to national historical climate and weather data, which will help nations understand how current efforts to mitigate the risks of climate change are impacting their communities. The project will link with ongoing efforts of the Group on Earth Observations (GEO) and the United Nations Committee of Experts on Global Geospatial Information Management (UN-GGIM) that are identifying key data sets that underpin the SDG indicators, particularly in reference to those that show how changing weather patterns and climatic conditions over time, can then be correlated with other data sets to reveal how climatic trends have impacted agricultural production, economic output, school performance, health, and human migration.