Well, its been ages. I am sorry. But hearing a nitwit on tv the other day say that there are no reported deaths can make a Meru man ran mad, head to KICC and panga the guy like non-sense. I was recently telling @mkaigwa the other day that during campus, we once had a lecturer who would ask a question. Now questions from this guy were not easy kama ndizi. ‘You see bwana you see you gorra think’, he would say with a British accent and the @iddsalim ‘youknowwharramsaying’ accent. So in the event a student feels confident enough to answer the question very confidently, he would pause. If he noticed you were bullshitting him, he would simply, cover his nose, pretending to be having an bad sneeze then after some time let it out. Then he breaks it down to you by saying. “I am allergic to bullshit”. Well that was what was on my mind when i watched the guy on t.v yesterday.
Well i first heard about the drought situation from a friend working with the UN-OCHA. And from his spatial analysis background things were thick. East Africa last faced a similar drought 60 years ago. Well with the current food crisis this makes it worse. It is estimated this drought will be around for another 3 months. I got this excellent map on Drought Mortality courtesy of the Open Data Risk Initiative. So i think since it is still under beta testing i will put some screenshots for you to see how dire the situation is. So credit goes to the Open Risk Data Initiative, UN-OCHA and the respective data owners.
Now we are always in the same damit crap. Now seeing this map i wanna ran mad but i know i can and should NOT! Is it because we are cursed by the Sahara? On this very same map other areas have deserts too so this can not be it.I also got to see a map with the affected areas vis-a-vis population density.
Now looking at the map Somalia is more affected. the red boundaries indicate areas affected. On turning off this layer and looking at the underlying rural population density you notice there is an overlap on areas densely populated with the affected area, and this occurs more in Somalia. The map below just show Kenya’s food secutiry situation. This link shows the different classification of Food Crisis. http://www.fews.net/ml/en/info/pages/scale.aspx.
- Brown – Classified as Catastrophe
- Pink – Classified as Emergency
- Orange – Crisis
- Yellow -Stressed
- Plain color – None
Well the above maps paint a grim picture of the situation. This still does not depict how dire the situation is on the ground. We are generally reactive and not proactive. Which is sad. GIS helps us in identifying and targeting the most hit areas and related density at those locations.Hence its indeed great to see Kenyans coming together to help each other in this situation. Join the #KenyansforKenya initiative.