Leslie Noye, Frances Brittingham, Cameron Kurtz, Maya Schoucair, Victor Ngetich, and Delvin Marimo are the six recent Master of Information Management and Systems alums behind FloodNavigator: a community-driven platform for sharing and viewing real-time flood conditions. FloodNavigator was awarded the James R. Chen Award for Spring 2025. To learn more, we interviewed the team —
What inspired your project?
Leslie: Growing up in Accra, Ghana, I witnessed firsthand how flooding could devastate communities — destroying homes, disrupting daily life, and causing significant economic hardship. When I visited in the summer of 2023, I saw that people still lacked a reliable way to share information during these crises. There was no central platform to track which roads were flooded or which neighborhoods were most affected.
Instead, people relied on fragmented communication — WhatsApp chats, Twitter posts, and scattered message threads — to stay informed. Seeing this gap sparked the idea of FloodNavigator: a centralized, real-time platform where residents can report and view flooding conditions across Accra.
This project was born from my desire to create a locally grounded, community-powered tool that leverages the way people already communicate to provide timely, accessible information during emergencies.
Flooding significantly disrupts daily life across Accra. A 2021 study found that 87% of residents experienced mobility disruptions, over 50% were unable to leave their neighborhoods, and 20% saw floodwater enter their homes. Emergency responders also face delays, as flooded roads hinder their ability to reach those in need.
Today, information about flooding is disseminated through word-of-mouth, WhatsApp groups, social media platforms, and over the radio. This information flow is decentralized and delayed, making it unreliable. Residents of the Greater Accra Metropolitan Area are desperate for notifications of nearby floods.
What was the timeline or process like from concept to final project?
Victor: We kicked off months of groundwork in the Fall of 2024, diving into Accra’s flood-risk literature, interviewing commuters and hydrologists, and mapping the competitive landscape. This work exposed a glaring gap in real-time, community-driven flood tools for the Global South.
By the end of the semester, we had sharpened our problem statement and formed an interdisciplinary MIMS team ready to build. From January to April 2025, we ran two-week design–build sprints. Early sketches were stress-tested in participatory workshops with Ghanaian students and residents, then distilled into low- and mid-fidelity wireframes; each usability round shaved steps off the reporting flow until logging a flood alert took just three taps. While the design loop churned, we stood up the tech stack: React on the front end, Django + PostgreSQL on the back. By late April, our lean progressive web app could ingest live reports, cluster them on a Mapbox layer, and fire location-based notifications. Keeping Phase 1 laser-focused on a simple, reliable, accessible minimum viable product (MVP) enabled those rapid iterations.
How did you work as a team?
Maya: We worked as a team seamlessly. Each of us brought our unique expertise to the table, which made it easy to divide and conquer tasks. However, our strength lay in everyone’s flexibility and willingness to take on and help with others’ tasks whenever needed. We met at least once a week to brainstorm, share updates, and (most importantly) laugh; and during the week, we worked independently. We maintained excellent communication throughout the semester, keeping everyone in the loop and giving each other feedback whenever requested.
How did your I School curriculum help prepare you for this project?
Delvin: In building the FloodNavigator app, we drew heavily on the skills gained from both Front-End and Back-End Web Architecture courses, which provided the technical foundation for developing a fully functional and user-friendly application. Beyond the core development, courses like User Experience Research and Information, Law and Policy played a crucial role, guiding our approach to user-centered design, ethical considerations, and regulatory compliance. Altogether, the interdisciplinary nature of the I School curriculum equipped us with the technical, legal, and design thinking skills necessary to build an app that not only works but resonates with users.
“Our theory of change is rooted in community partnership, cultural understanding, and a go-to-market strategy designed around social resilience.”
Do you have any future plans for the project?
Leslie: We are proud to share that our team is traveling to Accra, Ghana this summer (June–July 2025) to carry out our MVP pilot. Our theory of change is rooted in community partnership, cultural understanding, and a go-to-market strategy designed around social resilience.
Inspired by this, our 2025 pilot focuses on three core goals:
Build a network of early adopters by forming partnerships with trusted community leaders and organizations
Deploy MVP and gather feedback
Explore revenue models that expand our social impact
Through research and customer discovery calls, we have identified champions excited to help us develop partnerships in Ghana and to help FloodNavigator gain momentum. They will allow us to engage two key stakeholder groups for our 2025 pilot:
Ghana Online Drivers Union (GODU): GODU is a nationally recognized rideshare association led by President Francis Tenge. Drivers are ideal early adopters because flood conditions directly affect their income.
Makola Market Association: One of Accra’s busiest markets, Makola is flood-prone and central to economic life. Its vendors face losses from flooding and are highly motivated to stay informed.
Stakeholder engagements will also serve as forums for exploring potential revenue models that can enhance our social mission and ensure we can continue serving the community long-term.
These are the revenue models we will explore through conversations during our 2025 pilot that will inform further experimentation in 2026:
Microinsurance: Offer payouts to vendors disrupted by flooding, verified through app data.
Platform integrations: Partner with Uber, Bolt, and Yango to share data.
Flood sensors: Lease affordable water-level sensors to businesses for hyper-local alerts.
Peer-to-peer incentives: Enable users to reward helpful reports with micropayments with a small platform fee.
Donations: Encourage in-app giving to support free access for all users.
How could this project make an impact, or, who will it serve?
Leslie: FloodNavigator tackles a key equity gap in the way floods disproportionately disrupt livelihoods in low-income communities. On one of our research calls, a trader from Makola Market told us, “If I can’t reach the market by 6 a.m., I lose the whole day. That’s my profit, my food, everything.” Across Accra, flooded roads don’t just delay drivers, vendors, and delivery riders; they take away their income for the day.
By putting real-time flood updates into their hands, FloodNavigator helps protect daily income, offering a way to reroute, reschedule, or at the very least, not get caught off guard.
Over time, FloodNavigator’s crowdsourced reports — including photos, locations, and timestamps — will form a robust dataset that city planners can use to identify high-risk areas and prioritize flood mitigation. This data will also support strategic investments in drainage, waste management, emergency preparedness, and transportation infrastructure.
