What does the lush green English countryside have in common with the parched landscape of Mozambique? Not much you might think, but both have recently had to cope with massive flooding.

Despite its technology and vast resources, Britain was overwhelmed when large parts of central and northern England disappeared under water. So how on earth is somewhere like Mozambique expected to cope - a country where over half the population lives below the poverty line.

Mozambique is prone to natural disasters. The worst flooding occurred in 2000/2001 when an estimated 1 million people were affected. This year, after a long period of low rainfalls, the country was hit by tropical cyclone Favio in February, resulting in extensive flooding which uprooted some 140,000 people.

Mozambique's ability to deal with such crises is limited at the moment, but things should hopefully improve with a project to strengthen the country's disaster response through the use of maps and mapping technologies.

It all started when Professor Rui Maia at the Technical University of Mozambique, contacted British charity MapAction, whose expertise lies in making maps in the midst of disasters.

MapAction sent two of their volunteers to Mozambique to start training local agencies involved in disaster management in creating and updating maps during crises. One volunteer was Dr Toby Wicks, a specialist in geographical information systems or GIS; the other was myself, AlertNet's map officer.

New map-making technology or geographical information systems can provide constantly updated information during a disaster.

Imagine you're an aid agency logistics officer and you need to work out how many people need food and how to get it to them. This type of information is not always directly available, but an organisation such as MapAction can create an initial overview map by combining existing documents, for example, regional population statistics and road maps.

This overview map then allows the government and aid agencies to determine the potential impact, and it can be revised as soon as new reports come in from the field.

These maps are provided to relief agencies on the ground and published on humanitarian news websites. The benefits for aid workers in co-ordinating aid distribution more effectively are obvious.

Information that can be displayed on the maps could include the displacement of people, locations of hospitals and the areas where different agencies are already working.

We've now finished the initial training in collecting data in the field and incorporating it into maps.

Mozambique will doubtless face many more floods and droughts, but hopefully it is one step closer to building its own capacity to respond and thereby reducing the suffering these disasters inflict on its people.

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