RESIDAT

When households and communities have easy access to reliable and actionable climate information, they become capable to engage in proactive management of climate risks for effective adaptation. In disaster prune communities where climate risks information and data is non-penetrative, local vulnerabilities to climate hazard impacts are often exacerbated. This is the case for many climate sensitive communities across Africa where observed lack of inclusive and adequate climate knowledge resources and the lack of understanding of the climate change phenomenon obstructs proactive climate-informed decision-making. This has been highlighted by Afrobarometer (2019) in the largest ever survey on climate perception and understanding in Africa which reveals fewer than 3 in 10 Africans are climate change literates. Several IPCC reports equally illustrate the absence of climate data integration in decision making as a key factor for low climate adaptation in Africa. Inclusive climate risks information flow must therefore be established as a corner stone for disaster risks readiness and resilience building in climate hazard sensitive communities.

Our solution leverages drone technology and big data to map and distill place-based tailored climate risk information and knowledge to support hazard emergency and contingency planning in floods and drought vulnerable communities. In other words, our digital platform provides a ‘go to’ informational space for community stakeholders to understand and receive decision support on local climate risk and adaptation strategies. From households to community institutions, we attain the last data mile in climate risk information delivery in ways that enables targeted and personalized user experiences. We emphasize on making the platform inclusive and participative through our shared data infrastructure which integrates community intelligence from citizen science contributions. This sustained community participation in knowledge sharing and co-creating adaptation solutions enhances trust in our product use, amplifies benefits amongst target users and stands out from the conventional top-bottom approaches to data generation and sharing.

Climate sensitive communities in underserved rural areas of Cameroon are usually the most vulnerable to the effects of climate hazards which when they occur, often trigger a humanitarian crises. We are working in floods and drought vulnerable communities in mostly rural areas of Cameroon to strengthen household adaptation and resilience to the climate impacts by providing them with information and options to understand and plan for emergencies. Our platform provides a shared infrastructure for participatory climate surveillance and decision support services for strengthening the capacity of communities to adapt and build resilience to climate change effects. Our business emphasises well-being and safety as a community common wealth and aim to enable climate-informed decisions across different livelihood sectors and in diverse contexts. By building household and community consciousness on how enjoyment of good health, water and sanitation, livelihoods are impaired by climate change and climate variables, we draw a parallel of how effective livelihood planning through quality climate risks information and knowledge can enhance adaptation and overall resilience capacities of households and core communities.

The core team comprises of 4 talented youth (3 of whom are childhood friends) who all have academic backgrounds in the geosciences and has each separately worked as a geospatial analyst, teacher/researcher, climate analyst and an environmental advocate. Coming from a community which is frequently affected by floods, we started out with the hope of developing a scheme to help our local community understand and plan for flood events. However, realising the widespread of these climate hazard events, we have expanded our activities to other regions of Cameroon. For over three years now, we have been advancing climate adaptation of core communities through education, weather/climate information services and participatory citizen science approaches especially in mapping of climate risks and vulnerabilities. 

To generate our prototype, we initiated several activities around product development, data collection and analysis, and community organising with varying degrees of success. Our initial aim was to identify pilot project areas and carryout fieldwork to map floods and droughts. On this note, we targeted 3 hazard sensitive areas (Mayo-Danay, Wouri and Noun divisions of Cameroon) where we carried out drone flights and ground truthing activities to map floods and droughts risk in several communities of these 3 divisions. We then developed the first APIs of our geo web platform to visualise analysed data and so far, we have integrated 11 community-level interactive spatial dashboards with simplified UI that allows users to query visualised data. We have been testing and promoting these features with the local contacts  made during the fieldwork phase and feedback has been very positive. These local contacts currently are registered in our waitlist and provide us with valuable feedback from product testing. We hope to be able to deploy the product during the last quarter of 2023.

We created a waitlist of 50 users (local institutions) who are testing our solution and giving feedback accordingly as we develop and test our platform. We hope to fully lunch during the last quarter of 2023.

The Solve Challenge will be advantageous for us in the following ways;

-Technical mentorship; given our current lack of some complementary skills within our skillset, we will be delighted in some form continues mentorship and providing avenues for some our team members to improve their skills needed for us to fast-track our technology roadmap. 

-Networking; we will be interested in establishing connections with relevant climate stakeholder for sharing experiences and learning resources.

 -Visibility; Solve challenges provide an enormous platform that can serve as a springboard for further entrepreneurial exploits.  We are thus hoping through this opportunity to be at the lamplight that will permit us establish further connections after the challenge.