Ghana’s Youth Bridge Foundation (YBF) is leading a delegation of twenty (20) youth from 5 African countries to participate in this year’s African Climate Summit in Kenya.

With support from Nature-4-Climate (N4C); a conglomerate of 19 global climate-focused organizations, the delegation will showcase their respective conservation and restorative climate actions and highlight added value from the transfer of knowledge on nature technology from the YBF implemented ‘DUAPA Youth-Led Reforestation Pilot Project’ as a nature-based solution to restoring degraded land in Bowkrom; a farming community located in the Nsawam Adoagyiri Municipality of Ghana’s Eastern Region.

The African Climate Youth Summit and African Climate Week Summit are scheduled from September 4th to 8th and are expected to raise awareness of existing youth-led nature-based climate actions on conservation and restoration in Africa.

Speaking in an interview, one of the youth community liaisons on the DUAPA Project, 21-year-old Lucinda Afful from Bowkrom, a community in the Eastern Region was grateful to have been given the opportunity for the first time to travel out of her community to share experiences using technology and learn other nature-based solutions to combat the effect of climate change.

The delegations’ mission includes highlighting the ingenious use of technology within the DUAPA Pilot Project as a Monitoring, Reporting and Verification (MRV) tool for nature-based solutions in Africa.

The delegation will showcase well-documented films that project a climate concern and how they are using nature-based solutions with the help of technology.

DUAPA, which means Good Tree, connotes the importance of trees in the conservation and restoration of climate interventions couched from YBF’s Youth-Plant-To-Own-A Tree-Campaign initiated in 2021 to contribute to Ghana’s Green Ghana project and nature-based adaptation and mitigation strategy.

After its successful launch at the Conference of Parties (COP26) in Glasgow, UK, in November 2021, N4C partnered with US-based organization, If-Not–Us-Then-Who to fund YBF in piloting the ‘DUAPA Youth-Led Reforestation Project’ in Bowkrom.

DUAPA rides on the use of a mobile application originally used for mountain biking to track and monitor the growth of trees.

The Project mobilized and trained community youth without any training in scientific data to collect data, monitor and track plant growth with a mobile phone. Additionally, these young individuals were trained to capture aerial views of the landscape to track changes on their degraded lands with drones. This innovation was successfully adopted in the Amazon Forest of Peru.

Adopting the concept of citizen’s science, community youth who were once unfamiliar with scientific research methods and data collection now leverage mobile phones to collect data, monitor plant growth, and capture aerial views of landscapes.

This newfound skill empowers them to reclaim degraded lands and make informed decisions about the growth and health of their planted trees.

Youth Bridge Foundation Programmes Manager, Joyce Nyame, said the participation will afford the delegation the opportunity to position themselves as a generation of inspired African youth to contribute to solving climate change with nature-based solutions and technology.

“We will highlight the added value of technology through the ‘DUAPA Youth-Led Reforestation Project’ in Ghana and underscore the relevance of community youth in driving sustainable climate actions to address climate change,” she said.