UN and CaDRI statistics have proven that Societies around the world are suffering increasing losses due to disasters, and it is of the utmost importance to improve society’s ability to manage disaster risks. Effective Disaster risk management (DRM) requires the collaboration of a variety of stakeholders working in different sectors. They depend on each other to share risk information, and effective collaboration requires efficient communication.
In modern societies the authority, resources and expertise to manage risk are distributed among many different actors. As such, even the actions of a government or multilateral agency might not alone be enough to prevent and/or respond to disasters. This creates an imperative for individual actors (persons, companies, institutions and governments) to join together through risk communication networks to identify, analyse and respond to risks collectively, with the overall ambition of reducing losses due to disasters.
As such, an Early Warning Systems (EWS) like Angalia links individuals and information sources to effectively address various types of threats. Our EWS capability is based on maintaining a sustained exchange of information and data analysis, between EWS that intervenes in the detection and monitoring of threats and the relevant authorities and affected individuals, who finally make the appropriate decisions and guide the nation, community, business, family unit or social grouping, on the various types of measures available to be implemented to prevent harm and loss.
Angalia’s EWS capability further allows the users themselves the ability to report the various contingencies found in the affected area. The gradual decrease in the prices of telephony and mobile internet access coupled with the free reception of messaging, as well as the increase in the use of smartphones that can manage mobile applications all strengthen Angalia’s efficacy, making it a tool that contributes to adequate integrated risk management, which favors the identification, dynamic analysis, and monitoring of different threats, and allows monitoring forecasts on the probabilities and magnitudes of impacts, reducing the uncertainties in the population about the identified threats and reducing social vulnerability.
During the development of Angalia, the Android platform was selected for its versatility for the design of applications and for being the most prevalent on mobile devices within emerging markets, however, Angalia will also soon be available in iOS.
