Knowledge, Data, and Information

Africa has significant potential to improve its climate-smart sustainable development by focusing on the Blue Economy. However, efforts to reach this potential are stymied by poor access to relevant data and knowledge due to inadequate historical investments in technology and institutional capacity for modernization. Today, many opportunities exist to leapfrog traditional development paths by leveraging a new range of technologies. BlueTech refers to the innovative use of emerging technologies to scale up the development impact of the Blue Economy, while managing associated trade-offs. These technologies can potentially accelerate the expansion of the Blue Economy, but only if African countries invest in enabling infrastructure, capacity, and services to strengthen their technological innovation ecosystem. A robust technological backbone will better harness the power of the cloud, e-package data, and technological knowledge to enable new ways to collect, analyze, and share data, making it more accessible and usable. At the same time, it will facilitate the collaborative development of harmonized systems to generate insights into and support decisions relating to the Blue Economy