Dotscience supports Cyclone Idai Natural Disaster Aid Effort Hackathon in Harare, Zimbabwe
Mozambique, Zimbabwe and Malawi were recently devastated by Cyclone Idai, regarded as one of the worst ever tropical cyclones to affect not just Africa, but the entire Southern Hemisphere. The long-lived storm caused catastrophic damage taking the lives of more than 700 and displacing more than 120,000 people.
With the huge rescue and clean up efforts still in progress Panashe Chiurunge Chief Data Scientist of Deep Analytics decided to issue a call to action to Zimbabwe’s tech community.
“Zimbabwe has a thriving tech scene, especially in the area of data analytics and data science” says Panashe, “I wanted to see how we could empower them to help in the aftermath of Idai.”
The result of Panashe’s call to action is a high-profile hackathon taking place in Zimbabwe’s capital, Harare, on the 29th and 30th of March that looks likely to attract more than 100 volunteers from across the region.
Various organizations have also stepped up to support the hackathon including the United Nations, The Harare School of AI, PyconZim, Data Science Zimbabwe and Impact Hub Harare.
Attendees will be given large United Nations datasets containing satellite imagery of the affected areas before and after the cyclone and asked to provide data-driven insights to help the governments of Zimbabwe, Mozambique and Malawi with their ongoing reconstruction efforts.
Dotscience is contributing to the effort by donating the use of its Data Science platform to the event, supporting its teams to collaborate on the analysis of the terabyte-scale datasets. It has also made it possible to utilize a number of donated compute resources that are a mix of local servers and Amazon EC2 instances.
Dotscience CEO Luke Marsden says “We’re very pleased to be able to support this important initiative and will be on hand throughout the hackathon to make sure that the volunteers can concentrate on using their skills in data science to assess the impact of the cyclone damage.”
If you’d like to support to the Cyclone Idai aid effort please do so via the World Food Programme.
