In Ghana, flooding is a recurring issue that has devastated local communities, destroying homes and disrupting daily life. Domestically, flooding has also drastically affected towns and cities across the United States, most recently in Texas’s Hill County earlier this year.
As a result, six Master of Information Management and Systems (MIMS) alums and students — Leslie Noye, Frances Brittingham, Cameron Kurtz, and Maya Schoucair (all MIMS ’25) and Delvin Marimo and Victor Ngetich (MIMS ’26) — developed a community-driven platform for sharing and viewing real-time flood conditions. They named this platform FloodNavigator. In 2024, Noye received the Steven Weber Futures Fellowship to support the creation of FloodNavigator, and the project eventually went on to win the Spring 2025 James R. Chen Award.
“With these partnerships, we have the goal that — eventually through word of mouth and through scaling to different customers — this will get outside of Ghana and we will be able to establish other partnerships with other cities in neighboring countries.”
This summer, Noye and Brittingham traveled to Accra, Ghana, to establish connections with local resources. While there, they tested their minimum viable product (MVP) with key users, such as Ghana’s National Disaster Management Organization (NADMO), members of the Ghana Online Drivers Union (GODU), including rideshare drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, and potential platform users. They also consulted with a professor at the University of Ghana, who has been instrumental in providing the team with datasets and advising them about the business landscape in the country.
Most importantly, Brittingham and Noye met with large telecommunications companies (telcos) that have penetrated the market, such as MTN Group and Telecel Ghana. In many African countries, everyday people rely on their phones to pay for essential items with mobile money, thus making partnering with one or many of these companies a necessary element of financial success in the country. The two team members discussed the possibility of partnering on an integrated application that would be pre-installed on mobile phones, and the companies reacted positively to the idea. This pre-installed app would allow for each purchased phone to have access to the FloodNavigator platform, and notifications for floods would automatically be sent to each device.
“We realized you can’t just bring a fancy tool to Ghana and expect that to work,” said Noye. “You need strong partnerships on the ground, and I think that’s what our team did really well in the beginning, because we went to Ghana and were able to bring those partnerships and conversations that we’ve had and meet in person and show them what we built.
“The conversations that we had were so positive. A lot of people expressed that, ‘We want to see this happen. We want you to continue building this; we need a tool like this.’ Frances [Brittingham] and I came back with so much more energy and passion to continue building this out because of the conversations we had with people who are out in the field and potential partners,” he added.
As a result of these experiences, Noye and Brittingham began looking into immediate next steps to officially establish FloodNavigator on the market. They are exploring the pros and cons of being a nonprofit in hopes of better understanding what path would be best for the platform. The team also began looking into what other major applications or systems FloodNavigator could integrate with to scale the platform.
“With these partnerships, we have the goal that — eventually through word of mouth and through scaling to different customers — this will get outside of Ghana and we will be able to establish other partnerships with other cities in neighboring countries,” Noye said.
