In mid September, the International Research Institute for Climate and Society (IRI) helped launch an innovative new data platform in Lusaka, Zambia that combines satellite rainfall estimates with the country’s existing network of rain gauges. The platform, developed with the Zambia Meteorological Department and through funding from NASA, is the latest to come out of IRI’s Enhancing National Climate Services (ENACTS) initiative which aims to address the persistent problem of data scarcity and lack of access to climate information products in many African countries.

 

The World Bank Group’s Global Index Insurance Facility (GIIF) funded the event, which brought together participants from the Zambia Meteorology Department, R4, World Food Program and the country’s insurance sector. They used the new ENACTS platform to solve index insurance design problems and identified how previously untapped expertise, products and capacities could improve each step of the index design process, including data collection, analyses and comparison of various data sources, index design and validation and index performance assessment.

 

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