Rural Zimbabweans, who are often at the mercy of floods, have been given a new tool to avert pending disasters, namely radio technology.

As reported by SciDev.Net, the technology was developed by Zimbabwe’s Meteorological Services Department, with aid from other government departments and China’s Meteorological Aid Project for African Countries.

The tech piggybacks existing radio-broadcast infrastructure and automatically interrupts signals on programming to relay warnings of approaching severe weather conditions to high-risk areas.

According to the Zimbabwean government, about 250 people were killed and nearly 2 000 left homeless in flooding in the country between October 2016 and March this year, which is traditionally its rainy season.

12 December 2017
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