By Mohammed Awal
GHANA’S Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST) in partnership with Delft University, and support from Farmerline Limited and Oregon State University launched a computerized weather monitoring mechanism aimed at providing farmers with accurate weather report to guide them in their activities.
Speaking at the launch of the mechanism known as the Trans African Hydro-Meteorological Observatory (TAHMO) project Prof. Nick Van de Giesen, Chairman, Water Resource Management at TU Delft said the project’s main focus was to build a dense network of hydro-meteorological monitoring stations in sub-Saharan Africa.
Presently, the African observatory network is very limited he said noting that it was very crucial to reverse the trend as “three quarters of the population is dependent on agriculture and consequently on the weather.”
He added that with the TAHMO project a computerized weather monitoring station would be established within every 30kilometers, some 20,000 in total making weather and climate monitoring better understood.
Armed with improved predictions Prof. Van de Giesen said farmers could make well informed decisions on when to sow or harvest.
The President of the Global Water Partnership, a non-governmental organization (NGO), Nii Boi Ayibotele in his address at launch lauded all stakeholders involved in the TAHMO project for their foresight.
To him access to accurate climate data was essential and critical to the sustainable development of agriculture in Ghana.
Approximately, he noted 60 percent of Ghana’s workforce was currently into agriculture, therefore the establishment of such platform to monitor, collect and store both historical and futures climate date, interpret them in a simplified language for the cocoa farmer was awesomely welcoming.
More than 10,000 cocoa farmers are to benefit from the initiative which was funded by The Netherlands at a cost of £250,000.
The project would be done with the support of Farmerline’s innovative mobile technology, which would send voice and SMS messages in local languages to large numbers of small-scale farmers. awalm19@gmail.com
African Eye News.com
