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An Effective Drought Early Warning System for Sub-Saharan Africa: Integrating Modern and Indigenous Approaches

Published: 29 September 2014 Publication History

Abstract

Droughts remain the number one disaster in Africa; of all the people affected by all types disasters, drought is responsible for over 88% of them. An effective drought early warning system can support appropriate mitigation and preparedness strategies and hence minimize these effects. Existing systems tend to ignore the 'at risk' community and are faced with a number of implementation challenges; their utilisation is very low. This paper describes an effective drought early warning system that integrates indigenous and scientific drought forecasting approaches. The system is anchored on a novel integration framework called ITIKI (acronym for Information Technology and Indigenous Knowledge with Intelligence). Indigenous knowledge ensures that the system is relevant, acceptable and resilient. ITIKI further employs three ICTs (Mobile phones, wireless sensor networks and artificial intelligence) to enhance the system's effectiveness, affordability, sustainability and intelligence. This paper describes the design, development and evaluation of the system.

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  • (2024)Predicting Malaria Outbreak Using Indigenous Knowledge and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps: A Case Study of Vhembe District in South AfricaEmerging Technologies for Developing Countries10.1007/978-3-031-63999-9_9(145-164)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Cultural Considerations in AI Systems for the Global South: A Systematic ReviewProceedings of the 4th African Human Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3628096.3629046(125-134)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Improving multi-month hydrological drought forecasting in a tropical region using hybridized extreme learning machine model with Beluga Whale Optimization algorithmStochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment10.1007/s00477-023-02548-437:12(4963-4989)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2023
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cover image ACM Other conferences
SAICSIT '14: Proceedings of the Southern African Institute for Computer Scientist and Information Technologists Annual Conference 2014 on SAICSIT 2014 Empowered by Technology
September 2014
359 pages
ISBN:9781450332460
DOI:10.1145/2664591
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 29 September 2014

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Author Tags

  1. Drought early warning system
  2. Indigenous knowledge weather forecasting systems
  3. Information Technology and Indigenous Knowledge with Intelligence (ITIKI)
  4. Seasonal Climate Forecasts
  5. artificial neural networks
  6. mobile phones
  7. wireless sensor networks

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SAICSIT '14

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Overall Acceptance Rate 187 of 439 submissions, 43%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Predicting Malaria Outbreak Using Indigenous Knowledge and Fuzzy Cognitive Maps: A Case Study of Vhembe District in South AfricaEmerging Technologies for Developing Countries10.1007/978-3-031-63999-9_9(145-164)Online publication date: 29-Jun-2024
  • (2023)Cultural Considerations in AI Systems for the Global South: A Systematic ReviewProceedings of the 4th African Human Computer Interaction Conference10.1145/3628096.3629046(125-134)Online publication date: 27-Nov-2023
  • (2023)Improving multi-month hydrological drought forecasting in a tropical region using hybridized extreme learning machine model with Beluga Whale Optimization algorithmStochastic Environmental Research and Risk Assessment10.1007/s00477-023-02548-437:12(4963-4989)Online publication date: 9-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Drought characteristics and pastoralists’ response strategies in Korahey zone, Somali regional state, Eastern EthiopiaScientific African10.1016/j.sciaf.2022.e0125416(e01254)Online publication date: Jul-2022
  • (2021)Trail as Heritage: Safeguarding Location-Specific and Transient Indigenous KnowledgeProceedings of the 3rd African Human-Computer Interaction Conference: Inclusiveness and Empowerment10.1145/3448696.3448702(94-102)Online publication date: 8-Mar-2021
  • (2021)Indigenous knowledge and climate change adaptation in Africa: a systematic reviewCABI Reviews10.1079/PAVSNNR202116029Online publication date: Jun-2021
  • (2021)Prediction Model for Malaria: An Ensemble of Machine Learning and Hydrological Drought IndicesProceedings of Sixth International Congress on Information and Communication Technology10.1007/978-981-16-1781-2_51(569-584)Online publication date: 10-Sep-2021
  • (2021)Understanding the Climatic and Non-climatic Drivers of Livelihood Vulnerability in the Tigray Region of EthiopiaClimate Vulnerability and Resilience in the Global South10.1007/978-3-030-77259-8_14(279-296)Online publication date: 22-Aug-2021
  • (2019)ITIKI Plus: A Mobile Based Application for Integrating Indigenous Knowledge and Scientific Agro-Climate Decision Support for Africa’s Small-Scale Farmers2019 IEEE 2nd International Conference on Information and Computer Technologies (ICICT)10.1109/INFOCT.2019.8711059(303-309)Online publication date: Mar-2019
  • (2018)Towards the Development of a Rule-Based Drought Early Warning Expert Systems Using Indigenous Knowledge2018 International Conference on Advances in Big Data, Computing and Data Communication Systems (icABCD)10.1109/ICABCD.2018.8465465(1-8)Online publication date: Aug-2018

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