Using artificial intelligence to combat human suffering

Global warming is causing more and worse floods. Hardly any other country is as badly affected by this as Nigeria. A new program is now trying to support those affected before the floods come.

At the end of August, 27-year-old Ako Prince Omali discovered that someone had transferred 177,866 naira to his account, the equivalent of almost a hundred Swiss francs. More than half of what he can earn from growing rice and yams in a particularly good harvest year.

“I was overjoyed and couldn’t believe it at first,” he remembers. «I shared the money with my wife. She went out and bought groceries: corn, rice, beans, soup spices.” Ako Prince Omali put a good half of the money aside for repairs to the house.

Omali and his wife live with their four-year-old daughter in the small village of Ogba-Ojibo in central Nigeria, known as a flood-prone region. The sudden windfall also has something to do with this: a system developed by Google had determined that Omali's village would most likely be affected by floods in the near future. The payment process was then initiated as part of a program launched by the US charity “Give Directly”. Gifted money, no strings attached.

Omali knows from experience that flooding can be a threat to one’s existence. He still remembers a particularly devastating year. He was 15 years old at the time. The mud hut with a bamboo roof in which his family lived sank into the waters of the Niger. So is their farmland, about the size of a football field. “When the flood came, we had to move,” says Omali. They paddled in small boats with their few belongings from the flood zone to the higher elevation of Idah, a few kilometers further north.

Like hundreds of others who had lost their homes, the family built a makeshift shack out of bamboo poles - with cellophane bags to protect them from the rain. Normal everyday life was out of the question. Schools were closed and villagers were separated from their land.

“People were crammed into a very small space and the air was terribly bad,” remembers Omali. «Having to survive without hygiene, without clean water and without toilets is very stressful. We barely had anything to eat either.”

It can take months for the floodwaters to recede in Ogba-Ojibo. The fertile, sensitive topsoil is washed away. The result is often massive crop damage. Just last year, Omali lost another entire harvest, forcing him to take out loans and take odd jobs to make ends meet.

However, leaving Ogba-Ojibo is not an option for the majority of residents. “Most of us are farmers – and this is where our land is. If we move to another place, we won’t have any land there,” says Omali.

When Omali first heard about a new program in June of this year that provides financial support to people in flood-prone areas, he immediately signed up - and with him 30,000 other residents of the region.

Now he was one of the first to benefit.

The program is the first anticipatory action project of the organization “ Give Directly ” ( “anticipatory action” means forward-looking humanitarian aid). The organization is active in low-income regions around the world and specializes in direct payments that are unconditional. Experts rate this approach as a highly effective form of help. Similar programs are already being tested in Bangladesh and India through a partnership with Google.org , the nonprofit arm of the search engine giant.