Article by Andrew Mambondiyani: “..In March 2019, Cyclone Idai ravaged Zimbabwe, killing hundreds of people and leaving a trail of destruction. The Global INFORM Risk Index data shows that Zimbabwe is highly vulnerable to extreme climate-related events like floods, cyclones, and droughts, which in turn destroy infrastructure, displace people, and result in loss of lives and livelihoods.
Severe weather events like Idai have exposed the shortcomings of Zimbabwe’s traditional disaster-management system, which was devised to respond to environmental disasters by providing relief and rehabilitation of infrastructure and communities. After Idai, a team of climate-change researchers from three Zimbabwean universities and the local NGO DanChurchAid (DCA) concluded that the nation must adopt a more proactive approach by establishing an early-warning system to better prepare for and thereby prevent significant damage and death from such disasters.
In response to these findings, the Open Mapping Hub—Eastern and Southern Africa (ESA Hub)—launched a program in 2022 to develop an anticipatory-response approach in Zimbabwe. The ESA Hub is a regional NGO based in Kenya created by the Humanitarian OpenStreetMap Team (HOT), an international nonprofit that uses open-mapping technology to reduce environmental disaster risk. One of HOT’s four global hubs and its first in Africa, the ESA Hub was created in 2021 to facilitate the aggregation, utilization, and dissemination of high-quality open-mapping data across 23 countries in Eastern and Southern Africa. Open-source expert Monica Nthiga leads the hub’s team of 13 experts in mapping, open data, and digital content. The team collaborates with community-based organizations, humanitarian organizations, governments, and UN agencies to meet their specific mapping needs to best anticipate future climate-related disasters.
“The ESA Hub’s [anticipatory-response] project demonstrates how preemptive mapping can enhance disaster preparedness and resilience planning,” says Wilson Munyaradzi, disaster-services manager at the ESA Hub.
Open-mapping tools and workflows enable the hub to collect geospatial data to be stored, edited, and reviewed for quality assurance prior to being shared with its partners. “Geospatial data has the potential to identify key features of the landscape that can help plan and prepare before disasters occur so that mitigation methods are put in place to protect lives and livelihoods,” Munyaradzi says…(More)”.