Using Earth Observations and Statistical Models to Enhance Drought, Food Security, and Agricultural Outlooks in Eastern and Southern Africa

DESCRIPTION: Support the use of data already collected by co-Investigator Osgood to enhanced data sets supporting regional crop insurance efforts. The data gathered is from both east Africa and globally, focusing on the development of Index-based crop insurance for small-scale agriculture, and covers village-level loss-event histories for 102 villages in the project region of Ethiopia and Kenya, spanning from 1983 to the present, including information on agricultural practices and phenology of the most utilized crops. Much of this information is public domain that has been collected to support research efforts. These event-loss histories could be used as a means to validate yield predictions from EO products and/or ag-models, such as RHEAS, or in a capacity-building exercise to train RCMRD and other key personnel in how to analyze event loss histories with historical EO products.