How this Cutting-Edge Platform is Bolstering Disaster Response in West Africa

WFP’s Platform for Real-time Impact and Situation Monitoring (PRISM) is a climate risk monitoring system that integrates geospatial data on hazards such as droughts, floods, tropical storms, and earthquakes, along with information on food insecurity and socioeconomic vulnerability, to inform disaster risk reduction and social assistance programs.  

Through WFP’s technical assistance to government partners, PRISM can be adapted locally and handed over to strengthen governments’ disaster risk reduction capacity. PRISM is recognized as a Digital Public Good, supporting the achievement of the SDGs on poverty, food insecurity, disaster risk reduction and climate actions. 

Today, we sit down with PRISM’s Global Programme Manager, Amit Wadhwa and WFP Research, Assessment and Monitoring Advisor, Federico Doehnert, who guide us through the system following its recent successful deployment in Western Africa earlier this year. 

Hello! Thanks for joining us today. Could you share with our audience what inspired the creation of this solution?

Amit Wadhwa: PRISM started in Southeast Asia during the 2015-2016 El Niño-induced drought. During this period, WFP’s Indonesia office provided technical support to government partners for food security monitoring using satellite data to identify at-risk areas. We saw an opportunity and a need to further strengthen our government partners’ capacity to utilize satellite-derived data to inform policy and programme responses to the extensive drought then unfolding. 

The primary objectives of the project when we began were to simplify access to climate data, to combine information on climate hazards, exposure and vulnerability, and to leverage open-source software so that systems could be fully adopted by our partners in government. Since then, PRISM has gone from a WFP Indonesia project to a broader regional project. Now, PRISM is among a set of technologies and tools WFP's Geospatial and Remote Sensing team supports globally. 

Federico Doehnert: In 2021, we began considering a regional application of the PRISM platform in West Africa to improve national and regional early warning and food security monitoring systems by making geospatial data more accessible. This data would be integrated into existing processes, such as the Cadre Harmonisé analysis, for more comprehensive and timely information. 

PRISM also aims to be a collaborative platform for partners to share datasets, increasing data interoperability and fostering stronger partnerships. By ensuring prompt access to data and evidence, PRISM enables more efficient decision-making. Ultimately, we believe PRISM can become a crucial tool for informing early and anticipatory actions in West Africa. 

What are the key features of PRISM, and how do they enable frontline humanitarian support?

Amit Wadhwa: One of the key technical features in PRISM is the ability to view and analyze the intersections of hazard, exposure, and vulnerability over time. This allows users to monitor current hazards such as drought, and to put them into context by comparing with historical events, all while highlighting people and areas with high levels of vulnerability. In addition, the application allows for easy integration of new datasets adding locally available vulnerability information which helps users to better target any interventions to address climate hazard exposure.   

Federico Doehnert: We see various ways in which PRISM can enhance WFP's operational response on the ground. Firstly, the platform can track key indicators to inform our operational decision-making, identify areas needing specific attention, and prioritize our assistance. For example, PRISM enables us to quickly identify areas with high levels of food insecurity that are potentially affected by climate shocks such as droughts or floods. This capability allows us to preposition assistance or prioritize these areas in our emergency response. 

Secondly, PRISM is designed to be easily integrated with adaptive social protection systems and anticipatory action programmes. We are actively working with countries and partners to explore how PRISM can be incorporated into these systems to enhance their effectiveness. 

Who, would you say, are the primary end-users of the platform, and how do they benefit?

Amit Wadhwa: PRISM began as a tool for our government partners, specifically within the National Disaster Management Agency (NDMA) and National Meteorological and Hydrological Services (NMHS) to further develop the capacity of national institutions to prepare for, monitor, and respond to climate hazards.  

Within these agencies, users include analysts who create information products used by program implementers, and decision-makers who need the latest available information on areas at risk. Beyond our partners in government, analysts and decision-makers in humanitarian organizations including NGOs, UN agencies, and WFP country offices utilize PRISM and its outputs. 

Federico Doehnert: In West Africa, PRISM serves various groups of end-users. National and regional food security analysts, including our partners in the regional Food Security and Nutrition Working Group (FSNWG) from the Committee for Drought Control in the Sahel (CILSS), and national early warning systems, utilize PRISM for their analyses and monitoring efforts. 

Additionally, our country offices are primary end-users of PRISM. They use the platform to track the performance of the agro-pastoral season in West Africa and to inform their analyses and operational responses effectively. 

The latest PRISM development in West Africa is a major achievement. Could you explain what sets this initiative apart and why is it significant for the region?

Federico Doehnert: The PRISM deployment in West Africa is the first regional deployment of the platform. It is particularly significant for our region because it is developed as an integral part of the regional early warning system, in close collaboration with key regional partners like CILSS.  

Amit Wadhwa: As our first regional-level deployment, PRISM in West Africa provides a unique opportunity to monitor climate hazards from a cross-boundary perspective while making use of a long history of food security and nutrition monitoring in the region which has systematically been produced in sync for several years. We hope this will provide a model for future regional deployments and lead to country-level deployments in the region where we can add even more datasets at the sub-national level. 

What's coming next for PRISM?  

Federico Doehnert: The key priorities for the future development of PRISM for West Africa are multifaceted. At the institutional level, we aim to transfer the ownership of the platform to our regional partners from CILSS, led by the regional Earth Observation Taskforce. Additionally, we plan to integrate partners’ products, such as ACF's biomass indices and CILSS’ agro-climatic monitoring products, into PRISM. 

We also seek to develop tools that enable PRISM to directly inform anticipatory actions, such as triggers for early responses, and to support adaptive social protection systems. Furthermore, we plan to incorporate additional forward-looking data into PRISM, including medium-term rainfall forecasts and predictive models for climate shocks or food insecurity. 

Amit Wadhwa: We recently developed a new anticipatory actions (AA) module in PRISM for drought monitoring in Mozambique and Zimbabwe. The results of these pilots will help us support AA monitoring systems in new countries later this year and expand to floods and tropical storms. We’re also further developing approaches to facilitate shock-responsive social protection (SRSP) by integrating climate hazard data from PRISM and WFP’s Humanitarian Data Cube (HDC) into social protection information systems.  

Beyond these key programmatic initiatives, we’re also further developing the technology behind PRISM including more data integration which will help us improve access to flood early warning systems like the Global Flood Awareness System (GLoFAS), and simplify the integration of other geospatial platforms including ESRI’s suite of applications, and data catalogs making use of STAC – a growing standard to make geospatial data discoverable and usable across systems.