Strengthening Community Early Warning Systems Through Crowd-Sourced Data

Under the BHA-supported Scaling Community Engagement for Next Generation DRM in Indonesia and the program, Yayasan PetaBenaca (Disaster Mapping Foundation) a local Indonesian NGO, developed a real-time disaster warning system for communities in Indonesia’s capital city of Jakarta, as well as in urban areas of the Philippines. By combining crowd-sourced disaster reporting form social media platforms and government-validated data into a single interface, Yayasan PetaBenaca developed a free and open-source tool to help communities, as well as local, regional, and national government actors, respond to sudden-onset events. The platform uses humanitarian chatbots to automatically respond to new social media posts which include words associated with sudden-onset disasters—such as earthquake, fire, or floods—and prompts the individual who posted the message to complete a brief report and add a photo. The information from each report is immediately plotted on a live web-based map which is available to the public and provides real-time, actionable information to at-risk communities and emergency first-response teams.  Both systems feed directly into National Disaster Management Agency information management systems for immediate use.