SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa helps Rwanda and Malawi improve disaster management
Across the globe, disasters and their impacts have been on the rise. Developing countries are especially vulnerable to risks from natural hazards such as floods, landslides, and droughts. SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa is helping such countries in their region leverage geospatial technologies to reduce disaster risk and enhance regional capacity in disaster management.
The first step was to conduct a Regional Disaster Risk Reduction (DRR) needs assessment in Rwanda and Malawi to prioritize their efforts. The assessment was carried out through interactions with end users -- mainly government agencies and other supporting agencies such as NGOs and UN/international institutions. It focused on identification of priority areas for using geospatial technologies in DRR for Rwanda and Malawi as well as on data access needs, institutional strengthening, and technical capacity enhancement.
“There are many players in the region implementing activities in various DRR areas -- response, mitigation, capacity building, preparedness, and even recovery,” says Denis Macharia, SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa Disasters Program Lead. “For SERVIR, regional assessments are very useful as they give us an opportunity to identify areas where SERVIR tools, applications, and capacity building add value. The assessments enable the hub to prioritize activities and/or small projects that complement or respond to a need in a member state.”
Based on the assessment, two key SERVIR projects, one in Rwanda and one in Malawi, were chosen. They are described below.
Rwanda Project:
Web-based National Disaster Early Warning Information System
The government of Rwanda, through the Ministry of Disaster Management Affairs (MIDIMAR), has been developing mechanisms to enhance the government’s efforts to reduce the impact of disasters and build the resilience of communities affected by recurrent disasters in the country. Such mechanisms include targeted response and rehabilitation/recovery activities as well as DRR research projects. One example of the government’s effort is the Comprehensive Disaster Risk Profiles project funded by the World Bank and the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). The risk profiles for Rwanda will be a key source of information and data for understanding hazards and disasters, their impacts, and government’s contribution to improving the resilience of the general public.
The assessment conducted by SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa together with MIDIMAR made it clear that a platform was needed to disseminate the disaster risk profiles among other disaster related information. Thus, a data portal was identified as a key priority for the country. This portal, hosted by MIDIMAR, will facilitate data and information sharing with institutions and individuals working in the DRR area, serve as a coordination platform for all DRR related data and information in Rwanda, and allow results and products from the risk profiling project discussed above to be shared publicly. It will link national users to historical and near real-time climate datasets such as the US Geological Survey Climate Hazard Group InfraRed Precipitation with Station (CHIRPS)* precipitation, MODIS forest fire (once the products are available from the RCMRD MODIS receiving station), disaster impact trends from official sources in Rwanda, historical MODIS forest fire frequency, Global Precipitation Measurement Mission (GPM) precipitation, and baseline maps and hazard maps generated from analyses of Earth observation datasets such as those from EO1. The portal will also link national users with early warning information such as that from USGS Drought Early Warning Explorer.
“The Disaster Information Portal/System we are co-developing will help MIDIMAR and other stakeholders, both national and international, access hazard/disaster data in Rwanda,” says Mr. Jean Baptiste Nsengiyumva, the Director for MIDIMAR’s DRR department. “Rwanda, like many other countries, lacks historical data on hazards/disasters because available data is sometimes scattered across sectors. This system will address that gap. The web portal will also help MIDIMAR access data from all other institutions (as DRR is a cross cutting issue), and it will be a way of exchanging and accessing data on hazards very easily. We expect also for the portal to help MIDIMAR in publishing the outcomes of the project in a national hazard risk atlas, which is being implemented with support from the World Bank and UNDP. … In Rwanda we have a disaster management framework that goes from sector (sector disaster management committees) up to the national level, and this portal will play a big role in building the capacity of these different levels in terms of disaster risk reduction and management.”
Development of the Disaster Information Portal has begun, and a beta version is already available at MIDIMAR and at the SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa hub. An initial training targeting focal points to the National Platform for Disaster Risk Reduction (NPDRR) was conducted from 24-28 November 2014 in Kigali, Rwanda. The event introduced the focal points to the disaster portal and its features and demonstrated how to access and upload data to it. The training also demonstrated how to use data from the portal for hazard risk assessment. In addition, the training gave hub experts an opportunity to get feedback on the portal toward improving its functionality.
Portal development is expected to be complete by the end of March 2015. It will then be launched, and a national training will be conducted in Kigali to train key users of space technologies on methods used for hazard risk and vulnerability assessments.
Malawi Project:
Hazard, Vulnerability, and Disaster Risk Datasets and Atlas
In Malawi, SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa is working with the Department of Disaster Management Affairs (DoDMA), Department of Surveys, Ministry of Agriculture, Department of Environmental Affairs, World Food Programme, Department of Climate Change and Meteorological Services (DCCMS), National Statistics Office (NSO), Department of Water Resources, Land Resources Conservation Department, World Bank, United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), USAID, and others to develop a GIS database and a National Hazard, Vulnerability, and Disaster Risk Atlas. The information will be created for floods, droughts, vector-borne diseases (Malaria), and seismicity. The effort is a part of the intervention activities identified by the government of Malawi in its National Disaster Risk Management Policy for building resilience to climate change and disasters.
“Risk identification and vulnerability mapping are components of the second policy priority area in the Disaster Risk Management Policy,” explains Mr. James Chiusiwa, DoDMA Director. “To properly plan and implement disaster risk management programs, identification of risk and mapping the vulnerability are very critical. Vulnerability mapping (including the products) will not only be important for DRR purposes, but will also play a critical role in other development work, including prioritizing areas where a lot of development work is to be undertaken for resilience building. Malawi currently lacks this kind of information and capacity, and we expect that, through this support, we will be able to undertake our programs better, while contributing to the attainment of the Malawi Growth and Development Strategy and the National Disaster Risk Management Policy.”
As a strategy to ensure sustainability beyond current SERVIR support, an on-the-job training was provided by SERVIR-Eastern and Southern Africa from 8-12 December 2014 in Lilongwe, Malawi. Technical officers, also contributing as co-developers in this work, were taken through procedures for accessing/generating climate data, preparing data for risk and vulnerability mapping, and processing datasets to create risk and vulnerability products. Macharia explains the reason for involving the technical officers in product development:
“When we went to Malawi for the assessment, we learned about many consultancies that have been carried out in the country. These consultancies have produced data and information that is rarely being used by national experts/users. The main reason given is that quite often consultants do their work in isolation, without involving national experts sufficiently for them to learn the processes and interact with products or data produced from those consultancies. We decided to use a different approach -- that of forming a co-development team. We basically adopted the SERVIR Applied Sciences Team (AST) ‘sister’ project approach. The objective is to ensure, right from the start, that key national thematic experts are actively involved in the project. The initial on-the-job training is one component of that. During this training, we generated preliminary products that will form a part of the validation datasets once we incorporate feedback from the training. In addition, we involved the experts in collecting ground data, e.g., from NSO (Demographic and Health Surveys), and it’s planned that these experts will be crucial during the validation exercises.”
Additionally, the training introduced national experts/users to data and tools developed by the larger SERVIR organization and partners.
“We generated precipitation trends over Malawi for the past 30 years from the CHIRPS dataset produced and made available by the SERVIR AST project led by Jim Verdin,” explains Macharia. “We used the GeoCLIM** tool to generate this input variable that went into the vulnerability mapping.”
The national atlas produced in the project will be available as both hard and soft copy and through a web visualization tool plugged into the Malawi Spatial Data Portal (MASDAP). Once developed, the GIS database (geodatabase) will be also be shared with national stakeholders. The products will be available by the end of July 2015.
NOTES:
*CHIRPS is the first spatially and temporally continuous rainfall dataset. It is high-resolution global data.
**The GeoCLIM tool is designed for climatological analysis of historical rainfall and temperature data. It was developed by Tamuka Magadzire of USGS FEWS NET in support of the USAID PREPARED and Global Climate Change activities.