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 “My dear listener, mother, father, grandma, grandpa, uncle and aunt,
we are happy to inform you that the rains have now come and you
should be preparing to start planting,” he says.
Down the slope, 80-year-old Mariam Omulama is holding a blue radio
with a long aerial. The radio has a winding handle to power it, and
a solar panel to charge the built-in battery. She is tuned to Anyole
101.2 Fm – Ombogo’s station.
Nganyi RANET - it stands for “Radio Internet” – is a community radio
station set up by the Kenya Meteorological Service to target
communities particularly vulnerable to climate extremes. Each
station can broadcast in a range of 25-30 kilometers (15-19 miles),
and listeners within the zone are given free radio sets.
The other part of the station’s name comes from the Nganyi clan,
which for many years has predicted rains locally by monitoring the
behavior of plants, birds and insects. As climatic conditions become
more erratic, however, some of those traditional indicators are
failing.
“There was this demand for reliable climate information to enable
farmers to be able to work. So we thought it was a good opportunity
to bring together the meteorological people and the traditional
people who have relied on indigenous knowledge to make forecasts,”
said Evans Kituyi, a senior program specialist for the Collaborative
Adaptation Research Initiative in Africa and Asia (CARIAA), funded
by the International Development Research Center of Canada and the
UK Department for International Development.
The first rains of Emuhaya traditionally have come in February, and
this is about the time that farmers usually plant crops. But this
year every farmer held on a little longer.
That's because the radio station predicted that sufficient rainfall
for planting would begin around March 22, “so I can begin planting
from the 23rd onward,” said Enos Matende, one farmer.
The radio channel has been providing accurate weather information in
local language for about nine months, he said.
Meanwhile, in the neighboring county of Busia, a similar community
radio station is helping reduce deaths and property damage caused by
the floods along the Nzoia River.
“We monitor the rain-collecting centers on the hills of Cherangani,
Mount Elgon and Kakamega. The normal level of water should be
(below) 5.3 meters (17 feet) from the base. When the water reaches
this level we start getting warnings”, said Samuel Enos Namuleli, a
meteorologist in charge of RANET Bulala Fm radio in Budalangi.
The government has built 6-metre-high (19-feet-high) dikes along the
river to hold back floodwater. When the water level creeps too high
– between 5.6 and 5.8 meters – people are warned via the radio
station to evacuate.
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Each hour, the station passes on weather information and information
about the environment.
“We are reaching more people quickly and clearly. We are also
integrating this with other development issues. We are bringing in
experts from the ministries of agriculture, livestock, health and
education, among others, and these people can be able to enrich the
forecasts which are both traditional and scientific based,” said
Samuel Mwangi, senior assistant director at the Kenya Meteorological
Service.
Farmers say the information they are getting has helped them to plan
well.
“I used to harvest one bag of maize, but now I harvest four and I
used to harvest two bags of sorghum but I now harvest eight,” said
Fridah Ambunya Bulimo, a farmer in Emuhaya.
Nganyi RANET radio also has a digital weather station that
automatically relays weather information each 10 minutes, with the
same message sent to the headquarters in Nairobi.
Communities "are not just told it will rain here and there. They are
told it will rain in this manner or there will be no rain, so don’t
plant this time or plant this and that. Or if it will be flooding
down the valley, the schools there can be told in advance to
organize how they will have their classes in a different school”,
Kituyi said.
There are now five RANET radio stations in Kenya where the climate
change impacts are particularly strong. One, in Narok, is focused on
worsening drought problems; in Kagema the problem is landslides; and
in Kwale the station provides information on both droughts and
occasional flash floods.
“It is through this radio that we are able to educate them,” said
Namuleli, of RANET Radio in Budalangi.
(Reporting by Pius Sawa; editing by Laurie Goering)
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