| dc.description.abstract | hereas Kenya boasts of advanced drought
Early Warning Systems (
EWS
)
,
research
evidence shows that Early Warning (
EW
)
signals are not often translated to early
responses as required.
Evidence of drought
-
related food distress and famine shows that
even when EW information is available on time, humanitarian agencies are either caught
by surprise or take too long to respond
, making the whole EW
–
Response system to
malfunction at the most critical times it
is meant to intervene to save lives and livelihoods
of the most vulnerable. G
iven the increasing frequency and magnitude of drought
-
induced disasters in Kenya,
the need for this research and application of the findings
cannot be overemphasized as a precurs
or for
improv
ing
both policy and practice.
This research was undertaken among selected humanitarian agencies and
has revealed
that while earlier researches showed that all the six categories of barriers had the same
significance, sustainability and logis
tical barriers are the most significant barrier
categories that severely prevent the use of EWS to trigger early drought response in
Kenya.
The
research also found that system
barriers comprising of indicator, timeliness
an
d predictive capability
had much
less significance compared to the other set of system
barriers related to interpretation, presentation and communication capacities of EWS.
With a fifth significance ranking
,
institutional barriers also present
a significant
barrier
especially
implying tha
t there is
a
huge amount of corrective action that these
organizations can undertake to remove the barriers and enhance their effectiveness.
This study recommends actions that include
universal
early
trigger thresholds as well as
system audits and preposit
ion
ing
to resolve some of the barriers. More research will
however be necessary on how these barriers play out with regard to government and
donor entities
that
were not included in the scope of this study | en_US |
