From Early Warning to Early Action – can we move from crisis management to proactive, anticipatory approaches to drought management in East Africa?
In 2011 a drought hit Somalia that killed over 250,000 people, a report was released shortly after stating that this would not be allowed to happen again. Great progress was made on establishing drought monitoring systems and drought warning. However, despite this progress drought has hit the East Africa region once again, this time the numbers are more stark; 23 million people across the region face crisis levels of hunger, but the warnings have been there for years, we knew this drought was coming and we knew with quite high levels of certainty that it would be a bad one. So why did it happen? There exists disconnect between well established and pretty accurate early warning systems and what to do with this information. The system has the data on the problem (not enough rain) but converting this into information to deliver early action is failing.
Our talk at 5pm this Friday (9th June) in the Institute of Geography on Drummond Street, Room 2.13