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I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

Despite unprecedented advances in climate prediction and the data we have access to, farming communities around the world face the

same devastating crises over and over. In this talk, food security specialist and Ted Fellow

Catherine Nakalembe explores why knowing what will happen isn't enough. She explains what she views

as the critical missing link between technology and real-world action

that's keeping millions of farmers vulnerable and what we need to do to break this cycle.

We can predict droughts, floods, weeks, even months in advance, yet we still see the same crises unfold.

Crop failure, economic and environmental devastation,

and displacement,

the same crises that have trapped farming communities for generations.

This is obviously not a prediction problem,

it's a translation problem,

one that I came to realize painfully in 2015.

Equipped with the best tools available at the time,

including that very expensive fancy drone,

I spent August 2015 with my team in Karamoja

documenting yet another failed cropping season,

one that I predicted months earlier using satellite data.

This was part of the worst drought in East Africa in decades,

affecting 30 million people in Uganda, Kenya, Somalia, and Ethiopia.

After my field work, I did something researchers rarely do. I went straight to the office of the Prime Minister,

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