By Rosa Furneaux
In central Somalia’s Beledweyne district, families still reeling from food shortages and livestock deaths after another year of poor rains were surprised by a new disaster last month: brutal floods that completely submerged homes after the Shabelle River burst its banks.
Across the district, 230,000 people were driven from their homes, the U.N. refugee agency UNHCR reported, some fleeing through neck-deep water.
“The situation was devastating,” Ahmed Omar Ibrahim, an aid worker with Save the Children, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.
In the flood’s aftermath, “all the people (were) out from the town, scattered.”
But such disasters may soon no longer catch people unaware. A mobile phone alert system is set to roll out across Somalia, designed to text residents a warning before they are hit by droughts or floods.
Such warning systems are increasingly common around the world, but the Somali effort will mark the first time a nationwide mobile phone-based alert system has been set up in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP).
The alert system is part of a $10 million project, launched last week by UNDP and the Somali government, to improve the conflict-hit East African nation’s resilience to growing climate threats.
It includes efforts to educate pastoralists on better managing their resources and plans to build new weather stations, weather monitoring systems, and water storage dams.
Officials expect the mobile alert system to be fully operational in two to three years…
