Global challenges associated to climate change cannot be overstated. While human interference with the climate system is widely documented and increasingly concerning, limited research exists on the use of climate data for mapping health outcomes, especially in relation to food security at regional and international levels. According to the UN, food security is reached when “all people, at all times, have physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets their food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life”. Global food security has suffered significantly from climate events, with extensive research evidencing the effect of extreme weather events (including drought; floods; erratic rainfalls; dry spells) on local, country-level and international agricultural production.
Against this backdrop, it is of the utmost importance to understand current data use practices on climate data, in order to assess what types of data to integrate through platforms and how this data is best represented and visualised in relation to food security outcomes. As such, this MSc project sets the objective of making climate health data actionable by generating knowledge on the use of digital platforms for mapping relations between climate and food security.
The MSc project centers on a platform, powered by the DHIS2 ecosystem centered at UiO, which links food security to agricultural productivity and weather data in Malawi. The research will focus on data visualisation, representation, and use in the National Agricultural Management Information System (NAMIS) in Malawi, seeking to understand the effective use of NAMIS by staff at Malawi’s Ministry of Agriculture (MoA). Focus will be placed on the main NAMIS actors: data use practices will be studied among Agricultural Managers and Agricultural Extension Development Officers (AEDOs), who collect the readings of weather stations and enter the data into NAMIS. Access to this information is critical to enable countries and international actors to make informed decisions on climate health data, and the project will center on the actionability of such data for crucial decisions in the climate health space.
Who is this for
The project employs a qualitative approach, centered on 4-6 week fieldwork in Malawi. Previous experience of field research is not required, however, use of the qualitative research methods skills learned during the MSc will be paramount. Costs associated to travel and fieldwork will be covered.