Micro-level drought preparedness with information management and rural knowledge centres: a framework to support rural farm families

Abstract

Drought and desertification are serious problems that significantly affect hundreds of millions of people and ecosystems. When drought occurs, the farm communities are usually the first to be affected because of their heavy dependence on the stored soil water. If the rainfall deficiencies continue, even people who are not directly engaged in agriculture will be affected by drought. This underscores the vulnerability of entire societies to this phenomenon; this vulnerability varies significantly from one nation to another. Although crisis management approach is routinely followed approach for providing relief, the studies on drought, carried out in different parts of the world, suggested that preparedness is better than relief and information is backbone of drought preparedness. However, the efforts have been taken for generating micro-level drought assessment and early warning is least understood until recent years. It was therefore, in this study, an attempt has been made to develop a micro-level drought preparedness framework to support rural farm families. The established practices such as Sources of Agricultural Information management (International/National/Extra-Institutional), Information and Communication Technology (ICT) Enabled Rural Knowledge Centres (RKC), Open and Distance Learning Methods, micro-level drought assessment and early Warning technique have been identified as key components in developing such framework. These components were considered as the objectives of this research study, and conducted series of studies and experiments to understand the existing approaches and needed arrangements in defining and developing proposed framework. For each finding reported in the experimental objectives, a clear chain of evidence was established supported also by interview statements. The individual micro-level drought preparedness framework components were integrated carefully, based on the series of findings, systemic analysis of the data and the continuous interpretation of the observations, to develop the proposed framework. The study concludes that the proposed framework has shown a way to improve micro-level drought preparedness by bringing various ICT tools, information management techniques, open learning approaches, and micro-level drought assessment technique under one umbrella with an intermediary entity called ICT enabled RKCs owned and run by rural farm families. The usability evaluation studies on individual components revealed that the approaches such as these will have implications in planning micro-level drought preparedness strategies. The vulnerable rural families now have the means to estimate their own vulnerability and can use the information available at ICT enabled RKCs to make more informed decisions, which offers a sounder basis for designing drought preparedness and adaptation strategies.