Continuous Surveillance
Continuous surveillance will be undertaken to gather information that is necessary to carry out control operations. The information will include confirming the presence of desert locusts and stage(s) of development, establishing the exact location(s), determination of the affected surface area and ascertaining the terrain of the control operations area. The activities associated with the continuous surveillance include;
To realize effective surveillance and ensure that control operations are carried out in a safe and effective manner, training and capacity-building will be conducted targeting field teams in the affected counties and also staff at the national level. The MITT will conduct training for targeted team members drawn from both the private and the public sector, including the Locust Command Centre staff, National Project Coordination Unit and the county teams. The MITT team will develop technical content, training curriculum and consolidate updated locust technical information. The technical content on locusts will further be packaged into brochures, fliers, posters, manuals and web-based information for dissemination to stakeholders. The training will mainly be undertaken at two levels, namely at the locust control bases and at the county level.
Surveillance will be carried out via aerial and ground operations to obtain information that is necessary to carry out control operations. In order to apply desert locust control measures with a high level of precision and effectiveness, surveillance will be carried out using modern approaches such as satellite maps, drones, eLocust3 suite and GPS enabled cameras. These techniques will accurately determine the locations of large/small hopper banding sites, locust swarming routes and resting/roosting sites and egg-laying sites in the project implementing counties. The information generated from the surveillance exercises will be transmitted to the LCC in the Ministry, which will be responsible for coordinating action and keeping the national desert locust database. A modern ICT Data Centre will be established at the LCC at PPS Division for this purpose. The frequency of surveillance exercises will largely depend on prevailing climatic conditions. The Monitoring exercise will be undertaken by county teams with backstopping from MITT and LCC. The information generated will guide in decision-making on precise localities to be sprayed, choice of appropriate control methods and optimal timings for the control operation. Procurement of the necessary monitoring equipment will be undertaken.
The extent of damage caused by DL invasion in various ecologies will be assessed to inform the interventions required for increased resilience in the affected areas by collecting data on direct damage to crops and pasturelands. The data on damage will be compared with productivity of crops and pastureland determined through a baseline assessment carried out at the inception phase. The data will include types of vegetation affected, severity of the damage caused, amount of vegetation lost and land area affected. The damage assessments will be carried out by teams of experts constituted with guidance from MITT and LCC. The team of experts will develop a data-collection tool for ease and uniformity of gathering the necessary information. Data collection will be achieved through ground assessments, satellite imaging and associated geospatial technologies in affected areas. The information generated will be stored at the LCC, and will be processed and used in food and livelihood security decision-making.