Weather and climate information doesn’t reach Africa’s most vulnerable communities. There’s no weather channel, very limited early warning systems, and limited capacity in National Hydro-Meteorological Services (NHMS) to create rich targeted packages that could reach end-users. In response to this problem, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) dedicated a multi-national conference in Livingstone, Zambia, (15-17 March 2016) to the subject of “The Last Mile” – that is how we can package and share weather information to reach end-users. Experts from around the world came to present strategies on data packaging, communications and smart innovative ways to address this.
UNDP also partnered with the Brown Institute for Media Innovations – a bi-coastal collaboration between Stanford’s School of Engineering and Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism – and the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) to create the Climate Action Hackathon in Zambia as well, grouping talented developers in a room together, providing them with the type of data most NHMSs have, and having them develop tools that might address this challenge weather information challenge. Applicants for participation came from across sub-Saharan Africa, from New York City, India, Turkey, Italy, China and Oxford. "Africa’s challenges require home-grown solutions, and we were thrilled that so many Africans applied. In an industry regularly dominated by men, we also had a strong female contingent, meaning a diversity of perspectives, backgrounds, skills and interests. For the top 25 applicants, travel scholarships to Livingstone were offered by the UNDP Programme on Climate Information for Resilient Development in Africa (CIRDA)." The developers, all volunteers, were grouped into five teams, and given 27 hours to develop and present a prototype of their application.
Apps developed:
Climar, a climate information sharing platform that provides tailored advice to different sectors of the economy with recorded information in local languages.
The Knife’s Edge (Extend) tool could improve climate and weather information transfer to Agricultural Extension Officers in order to improve decision making by farmers.
Climate Frame, a framework that allows local experts to frame data by defining specific actions that are executed when certain events occur within real time data. Also added simple text message that would allow illiterate farmers to know when to plant and water via symbolic text messages sent over SMS.
The Farmers’ Guide Project. This project works to provide farmers with improved information on when to plant and how to maximize profits and productivity.
The #mLisho Project - created a basic early warning system platform that uses a mobile phone SMS API to send sustainability and market information to nomadic pastoralists based on predictions of range land productivity and market studies.
More info:
Blog: Climate Action Hackathon Connects Innovation, Ideas, People and Technology
Read project proposals, briefs and see product introductions online in the Climate Action Hackathon Blog
A tweet from the person that wrote a blog about this event and was there, with a great photo.