Community based Surveillance (Matthew Cousins, OXFAM UK)
A key part of response to Locust outbreaks is tracking the swarms as they go from community to community. Such information is crucial to improving our understanding of swarm behaviour, as well as the more immediate need of feeding the early warning systems. Swarm tracking or swarm surveiilence is typically done by specialized organisations and teams of experts. But the efficacy of this process… and the resolution of swarm data collected…. can be dramatically improved by crowdsourcing such information through rural communities which receive the swarms. Matthew Cousins, Director of Oxfam Kenya, takes us through how his organization implemented such a programme of community surveillance in Kenya. This presentation was made at the 1st Virtual Practitioners Conference on Desert Locust Management (August 10, 2020)
