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Flooding in the Greater Horn of Africa: building effective early warning systems

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Executive summary

  • There is a clear need to increase the efficacy of Early Warning Systems (EWS) in the Greater Horn of Africa (GHA), to reduce the impact of flooding events on the lives and livelihoods of people living in that region. In particular, EWS must reach the so-called ‘last-mile’; highly vulnerable communities based in remote and rural areas with a low inherent resilience to disasters

  • To be effective, EWS should be ‘impact-based’ and ‘people-focused’, empowering user communities to take appropriate action rather than providing a technically accurate meteorological or hydrological forecast and delivery, and engage the end users across the whole EWS process from requirement gathering to design

  • The chain of institutions, stakeholders and actors involved in most EWSs is long and complex; there is a need to reduce this complexity to increase the systems’ efficacy.

  • At the same time for any EWS to be effective it must understand its users completely, and have their confidence and trust. It must ensure that its users are motivated to take appropriate action in the event of a (flooding) disaster

  • In order to satisfy these contradictory aims, an effective EWS must be one with:

    • Reduced complexity at the top (supplier) end of the chain

    • Increased specificity at the bottom (user) of the chain

  • To achieve this requires increased levels of five qualities throughout an EWS:

    • Coordination

    • Communication

    • Institutional Capacity

    • Ownership

    • Empowerment of the end-user

  • The specific socio-political context of the GHA provides some barriers to increasing the efficacy of EWS in that region. Namely:

    • Different political systems and cultures
  • A lack of political drive to improve EWSs

  • A lack of inter/intra-national funding for relevant institutions

  • Political instability

  • The WMO framework for EWS evaluation was critiqued during break-out group discussions (see page 11)

  • Based on the discussion, representatives from each of the GHA nations (present at the conference) developed strategies to implement in their countries. In every case the aim to increase collaboration between relevant national stakeholders and neighbouring countries was expressed. (See pages 11-12 for more detail.)