Famine Action Mechanism (FAM)

Global Technology Firms to Provide Expertise on Frontier Technology to Better Predict Famines.

Transcript

1. FAM Global Technology Firms to Provide Expertise on Frontier Technology to Better Predict Famines The United Nations, World Bank, International Committee of the Red Cross, Microsoft Corp., Google and Amazon Web Services are launching the Famine Action Mechanism (FAM). The FAM will use state-of-the-art technology to provide more powerful early warning to identify when food crises threaten to turn into famines. These alerts will trigger pre-arranged funding and action plans by donors, humanitarian agencies and governments to generate earlier and more efficient interventions. Numbers Least Developed Countries in blue, as designated by the United Nations. Countries formerly considered Least Developed in green. 19 February 2018 In 2017, more than 20 million people across north-eastern Nigeria, Somalia, South Sudan and Yemen faced famine or famine-like conditions…
2. Today, 124 million people live in crisis levels of food insecurity, requiring urgent humanitarian assistance for their survival. Over half of them live in areas affected by conflict. Ongoing conflicts around the world. (Only the locations where the conflicts are taking place are coloured) Maroon color: Major wars, 10,000+ deaths in current or past calendar year Red color: Wars, 1,000–9,999 deaths in current or past calendar year Orange color: Minor conflicts, 100-999 deaths in current or past calendar year Yellow color: Skirmishes 10-99 deaths in current or past calendar year Based on above, around ~16% of operations occur in least developed countries and more than >50% are in a war zones. Announcement of September 23, 2018 states that famine prevention, preparedness and early action can result in cost reduction up to 30% for this humanitarian billion dollar market. In the last decade, the Bank has invested up to $3 billion annually in food security initiatives and will be looking for additional ways to increase these investments in future projects and programs. Source: United Nations, World Bank, and Humanitarian Organizations Launch Innovative Partnership to End Famine
3. Technology World Bank contribution comes under the name Global Crisis Risk Platform (GCRP), where As a platform, its focus will be on strengthening “horizontal” collaboration, learning, and information-sharing across sectors and Regions, and strengthening synergies between existing and new workstreams across the Bank. …when The primary objective of the GCRP is to strengthen the Bank Group’s ability to provide a coherent and strategic approach to identifying and mitigating crisis risks in client countries before they turn into full-blown crises. Source: Global Crisis Risk Platform (English) While the corporate representation of the group choose an ancient Greek name for their project. Google, Microsoft and Amazon Web Services and other technology firms are providing the world’s top expertise to develop a suite of analytical models called “Artemis” that uses advanced Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning to estimate and forecast worsening food security crises in real-time Google Agriculture https://cloud.google.com/data-solutions-for-change/open- agriculture/ Microsoft Artemis (?) https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/research/publication/hunting-for-problems-with-artemis/ Challenges Although, Amazon advertised that 2 of their products will be used to process images, war, weather, agricultural production and food price data to train the AI, data collection seems to be the challenge. Predicting famine is difficult due to many factors, including differing international standards for famine data collection and diverse causes of famine (climate, conflict, economic policy). Although Machine Learning (ML) and AI models can learn complex patterns and make accurate predictions, often the potential of these technologies is limited by the quality of the data. …
4. One clear challenge, however, is the frequency at which data is produced and analyzed as major food security reports usually come out only twice a year. These reports are the result of intense surveys and require significant investments in time and energy. Source: Helping to End Future Famines with Machine Learning Hunger Map World Food Programme / 2019 - Hunger Map https://www.wfp.org/publications/2019-hunger-map