AylluDamos – Think Tanks for sustainable development

As the city Trujillo in Peru prepared itself for heavy rainfall on November 20 2019, many citizens were using a novel smartphone app to receive updates from the city administration and to share critical information with other users of the app at the same time. Trujillo had been hit by floodings already in the years prior, a total of seven in 2017 alone. During those times, streets are largely under water. Thousands of houses get damaged and again and again people lose their lives in the floods as well. Due to the weather phenomenon El Niño and climate change the frequency of events like that is increasing constantly. On that day in November, the app with the name AylluDamos (“Ayllu” is the word for family in Quechua and “AylluDamos” resembles the Spanish phrase “we help”) gathered data in real time. In doing so, it helped the citizens to locate family members and friends or provide supplies where they are needed the most. Because of an early warning system positioned in the mountains close to the city the people were not caught off guard by the natural disaster on that occasion. They were able to prepare.

Additionally, the city administration is going to be able to use the collected data in order to develop a climate-resilient urban development and planning. The amount of data that the AylluDamos App gathers during a flooding like that would have taken the officials months

to collect before they had access to the technology. Now the data can be used to, for example, strategically equip streets that have been exceedingly affected by floodings with water drains.

Hightech and a Community sticking together

AylluDamos' system consists of several components that make use of both the sensitive sensors of a meteorological station and the citizens' eyes and ears. A weather station in the mountains near the city is the centerpiece of the early warning system that is supplemented with satellite images taken from space. In the city the population uses the app on their smartphones to protect themselves, locate relatives and help fellow citizens. The officials are able to access georeferenced data through a dashboard in the citiy's monitoring center in order to coordinate all measures. That way, AylluDamos combines technology and social network effects to achieve innovative synergetic effects contribute to fulfilling the United Nations' Social Development Goals.

Open Source Technology fit for Deployments all around the World

AylluDamos was developed in cooperation with citizens and officials of the city Trujillo and purposefully conceived as open source technology. The “Co-Creation” process was driven forward by means of a hackathon and so-called “Design Thinking Sprints” with citizens of the affected neighborhoods as well as various stakeholders from the city until ultimately the functionality and design of the system had been defined. Following the successful pilot phase, the GIZ project “ICT-based Adaption to Climate Change in Cities” created a comprehensive transfer package and made it available to all city administrations through the Peruvian Council of Ministers. The transfer package consists of the source code of the app and the dashboard for the officials of the respective cities, tutorial videos as well as manuals and informative literature to help educate the citizens and employees, a data privacy training, a sustainability model for larger and smaller city administrations and a comic illustrating the requirements of the transfer.

Since 2019, the digital solution AylluDamos is also running in the city Chiclayo and currently it is being applied for the first time outside of Peru in the Indian city Kochi. The idea can be applied in different local contexts thanks to the open source approach. In the future, AylluDamos is going to help making cities all around the globe more resilient and safe in the face of weather phenomena amplified by climate change.

Sector: Governance / urban development and planning / climate change
Region: Peru
Technology: Internet of things / sensors / app
Project status: Completed