Telecoms firms Ericsson and Zain, and the United Nations weather agency, teamed up on Thursday to harness Africa’s booming stock of cellphones to SMS vital weather information to villages.
Brought together by former UN chief Kofi Annan’s foundation, the venture is also aiming to use the equally burgeoning network of cellphone transmitters to bolster the continent’s dangerously sparse cover of weather sensing stations.
By early 2008 there were about 260-million cellphone subscribers in Africa, according to the International Telecommunications Union (IYU).
“Today you will find cellphone towers in almost every part of Africa. We have never been able to establish weather monitoring on that scale until now,” Annan said at the launch in Geneva.
“The world’s poorest are also the world’s most vulnerable when it comes to the impact of climate change — and the least equipped to deal with its consequences,” Annan told a global conference on disaster risk reduction.
Annan’s Global Humanitarian Forum recently estimated that Africa suffered close to a quarter of the $100-billion and 300 000 lives lost worldwide every year due to the impact of global warming on health and agricultural productivity.
The World Meteorological Organisation has highlighted big gaps in weather forecasting in Africa, with a network eight times below an acceptable minimum.
The initial deployment is under way with an $8-million project on African operator Zain’s network in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda. It will harness about 5 000 phone transmitters across Africa.
Individual farmers or villages will also receive tailored information about local weather conditions, to help them prepare for extreme conditions or to tend crops and livestock.
“The phones are now so widely spread that the information will get to somebody,” Ericsson chief executive Carl-Henric Svanberg told journalists.
That could offer a potential lifeline for many on the continent where 70% of the population, or 700-million people, rely on farming for their livelihoods, according to the organisers of the “Weather Info for All”.
Africa’s cellphone market is growing at twice the rate of the rest of the world according to the ITU. – AFP