Duncan610/econmate

A real-time economic & climate vulnerability intelligence system for Sub-Saharan Africa, built on Databricks, PySpark, and Delta Lake. # EconMate ### Real-Time Economic & Climate Vulnerability Intelligence for Sub-Saharan Africa > *A production-grade data engineering pipeline built entirely on Databricks: PySpark · Delta Lake · Unity Catalog · Medallion Architecture* --- ## The Story Behind This Project I grew up in Nairobi. Not in the abstract, policy-document version of Nairobi, but in the real one where you notice things. You notice when the prices of commodities rise. You notice when your neighbour's son stops going to school in February. You notice the silence that falls over a market when the rains don't come for the third season in a row. What I did not notice until much later was that these things were connected. The drought. The price spike. The school dropout. The quiet. They were not separate events happening to separate people. They were one compounding crisis, moving through a community like a slow current visible everywhere, named nowhere. When I started learning data engineering, I kept running into the same wall. The tutorials were built around problems that already had infrastructure. New York taxi rides. Spotify listening history. Amazon reviews. The data was clean, the APIs were stable, the problems were solved. Africa was always a footnote. Not because the data did not exist, but because nobody had built the pipeline to read it all in the same place at the same time. I disagreed with that. So I built EconMate. --- ## The Problem Sub-Saharan Africa is home to over 1.1 billion people and some of the world's most complex, compounding vulnerability cycles. A climate shock triggers a food crisis. A food crisis amplifies economic stress. Economic stress raises the conditions for conflict. Conflict worsens the next climate response. The signals that describe this cycle exist. They are being collected by the World Bank, by climate scientists publishing open APIs, by humanitarian organisations tracking food insecurity. But they are collected in silos. A policymaker trying t …