The project is led by Dr. Julianne Susane Sansa Otim as Principal Investigator.
WIMEA-ICT is a combined research and capacity building project funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) under the Norwegian Programme for Capacity Development in Higher Education and Research for Development scheme. It is a co-operation between Makerere University in Uganda as host institution, Dar es Salaam Institute of Technology in Tanzania, the University of Juba in South Sudan and the Geophysical Institute of the University of Bergen.
Accessibility to reliable weather information is vital for decision making in various sectors such as agriculture, disaster management, aviation, fishing, energy, mining, construction, defense, water resources and health.
The project aims to improve the accuracy of and access to weather information by the communities in the East African region through suitable Information and Communication Technologies for increased productivity in the agricultural, energy, water resources and construction sectors and safety in the aviation, disaster management, fishing, health, mining, and defense sectors and consists of 5 main components.
These are;
- Weather information dissemination
- Weather data repositories
- Numerical weather prediction
- Weather station network density
- Research and teaching capacity building
So far, over 10,000 farmers and other actors in Uganda have subscribed to the application and are accessing timely weather information, using USSD *255*85#
