Africa’s sovereign amber alert network
When floods strike Sub-Saharan Africa, communities don’t just lose homes — they lose harvests to waterlogging and lives to malaria weeks later. SHELTER watches with cloud-piercing radar, forecasts the whole cascade, and delivers the warning even when the network is down.
Pipeline ok · advisories generated · delivering on Email, Webhook
One platform, one satellite pipeline, four audiences. The MVP ships Agricultural Intelligence first — Environmental, Public Health and Financial & Credit Risk Intelligence follow as the next phase, on the same engine.
Watch a plot through the season and know before a harvest is lost, not after.
The same cloud-piercing flood detection that already protects farms, surfaced for responders and planners.
Standing water today is a malaria surge in roughly six weeks — and we already see the water.
A verified place is the missing half of a credit decision — and the same satellites already see it.
Sentinel-2 cannot see through a rainstorm. The cloud that hides the ground is the same cloud that is causing the flood, so optical-only systems report nothing during the event they exist to detect.
Standing water becomes waterlogged roots in days, a lost harvest in weeks, and a malaria surge in roughly six. Each stage is predictable from the one before, and each is warned about separately or not at all.
A flood takes out power and backhaul. The channel most warning systems depend on is the channel the disaster removes first.
Watches for new satellite coverage of every area under monitoring, and knows when it arrives. When cloud hides the ground it says so and switches to radar rather than reporting nothing — the moment most services go quiet is the moment ours has to keep working.
Measures what changed on that specific piece of land: how much of it is holding water, and how much of the crop is under stress. Measurements only — no interpretation, no judgement, just the numbers the decision will rest on.
Decides whether those measurements amount to a hazard, how severe it is, and how confident we are. Weighs the 7-day rainfall outlook and how many people are actually exposed, then names what the hazard is likely to trigger next — flooding leads to waterlogged crops, which lead to standing water and the health risk that follows.
Turns the decision into an advisory in the subscriber's own language, grounded strictly in what was measured, and delivers it on every channel they chose. When the ground network is down — which is when a flood warning matters most — it escalates to NIGCOMSAT-1R satellite broadcast.
Runs backward, days later, and asks the one question nothing else asks: were we right? It looks for independent confirmation of the hazard we warned about and records a verdict. Where a remote area has no coverage either way, that is recorded as unverified — never quietly counted as a false alarm. No verdict can ever change an advisory, so accountability stays separate from the warning it judges.
WhatsApp, Telegram, Signal, email and Slack all assume the recipient has working internet — the assumption a flood breaks first. At warning level and above, or when every terrestrial channel has failed, SHELTER escalates to a one-way NIGCOMSAT-1R broadcast that reaches the whole Ku-band footprint with no ground network at the receiving end.