chocle254/Pulsecast

Pulsecast is an AI-powered platform that forecasts drought phase shifts in Kenya's counties weeks in advance, turning NDMA's data into early, actionable warnings. # Pulsecast **Drought forecasting and aid-alert broadcasting for Kenya's 23 ASAL counties — built on NDMA's own data.** Built for the IGAD Hackathon 2026: Smarter Early Warning, Stronger Communities. --- ## The problem Kenya's National Drought Management Authority (NDMA) publishes real, government-defined drought bulletins every month — a five-phase system (Normal → Alert → Alarm → Emergency) covering all 23 Arid and Semi-Arid Lands counties. It's a genuinely good monitoring system. But it's a monitoring system, not a forecasting one — it reports what's already true. Every month, county coordinators and NGO field officers repeat the same manual cycle: read a dense PDF, judge which counties look like they're drifting toward trouble, then decide whether to act — often only after the phase change is already official and the lead time to prepare is gone. ## The solution Pulsecast takes NDMA's own published bulletins and does two things NDMA's bulletin can't: 1. **Forecasts.** A per-county model projects each county's vegetation-condition trend 4–6 weeks ahead and flags the exact date it's likely to cross into a worse NDMA phase — ranked into one priority queue, explained in plain language, with every claim traceable back to its source bulletin. 2. **Acts.** The moment a county's *confirmed* phase enters Alert, Alarm, or Emergency, a **Send Aid** panel unlocks on that county's page. A coordinator drafts a real distribution — aid type, date, time, drop-off points — and Pulsecast generates a ready-to-broadcast SMS alert in **English and Kiswahili**, sized to real segment limits, with aid type automatically nudged toward livestock feed and water in pastoralist counties. Pulsecast doesn't just tell someone what's coming. It gives them the message that gets a community ready for it. --- ## Features ### Data ingestion & parsing - Live scraper pulls NDMA's monthly drought bulletin PDFs directly from NDMA KnowledgeWeb. - PDF parser extracts per-county VCI3M / SPI va …