About Evans

My name is Ndung’u Evans Karanja, I am a location intelligence enthusiast and a recent graduate from Jomo Kenyatta University of Agriculture and Technology.

At the time of writing this blog, I am an intern at United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs’ Regional Office for Southern and Eastern Africa (OCHA ROSEA).

Previously, I was interning at GeoPsy Research as a GIS and Remote Sensing research intern with key research interest on Food Security.

Memorable experience

My experience as an intern at GeoPsy Research will remain to be memorable for the rest of my life. It was more than an internship but also a mentorship experience.

The first day of my internship, I was required to present on my undergraduate degree project on developing a GIS based Parking Management and Guidance Information System to the rest of the team.

Being my first day, I was really nervous at first but as I went through the slides, I was able to build my courage. Being my final year project and having presented it four times in school, I was really conversant with the concept. I received a couple question from the team, which I was more than willing to answer. The purpose of the presentation was to highlight my research interest.

Food security characterization

However, in the previous weekend, I had come across the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and really got interested on SDG2 on ZERO HUNGER. I was really convinced this was my next research challenge and so when the team asked me about a thematic area that I was interested in focusing on during my internship, I chose food security characterization project.

Food security characterization entailed developing machine learning models to geographically cluster regions based on their vulnerability to food insecurity and also to identify food security similarity zones in the face of various climatic and socio-economic pressures.

I wasn’t really new to programming but I was new in the field of machine learning. The first couple days involved getting acquainted with the Python programming language machine learning libraries such NumPy, Pandas, Matplotlib, Seaborn and PySAL. Thereafter, I had to read and identifying appropriate clustering algorithm to use in the analysis.

Learning and Exposure

Although it was a steep learning curve, I have managed to develop preliminary clustering codes. The exercise was not only a learning experience but also opened my eyes to my own interests and to the potential direction that my research should take.

The epitome of the internship was when I got a chance to host a webinar as part of the weekly GeoPsy webinars. My topic for the webinar was on GIS-based Parking Management and Guidance Information System.

The experience was quite thrilling being my first webinar and also the fact that I was sharing my concept of how I would envision an effective and efficient parking management system to a wider audience virtually.

I would like to sincerely thank Dr. Francis Oloo, for the opportunity at GeoPsy Research and his great mentorship. In addition, I would also like thank my colleagues at GeoPsy including Kitavi and Alvin for the great support and friendship during the internship period. I look forward to applying my experiences from GeoPsy in my current work and future research.