Umwuzure: River Watch

A river rises upstream hours before it reaches the people downstream. Those hours are the whole
warning — and in most places along most rivers, nobody has a gauge, nobody has a forecast, and the
people who would benefit most are the ones with no data plan on their phone.

But somebody upstream can see the water. They know the stone step, the bridge pier, the wall by
the ghat. They know when the water is halfway up it, and they know when it has never been this
high.

Umwuzure turns that into something the next village can act on.

You photograph one fixed thing beside the water — a step, a pier, a tree root, a wall. The app
divides your photograph into five ordered marks on that landmark. From then on, reporting is one
tap: where does the water reach right now? No metres. No gauge readings. No numbers you would have
to guess.

Because the app never asks for a measurement, it does not have to trust one. Instead it learns
your site from your own history: after a few reports it can say where today sits against every
reading this landmark has ever had. Points along the same river are matched to each other by how
their rises actually line up over time, so an observation upstream can be turned into an expected
arrival at the places below — always as a range, never as a single time, and always labelled with
how confident that range is.

A single report never travels. It shows as a local concern to the immediate neighbours, and only
becomes a downstream notice when other observers or other points corroborate it. Patterns that
could not physically have happened in that order are held back rather than passed on. An
unverified alarm running down a river does real harm, and the app is built to refuse to be one.

Everything works with no signal. Reports are written on your phone first and delivered when a
connection returns, and the same report cannot arrive twice however many times it retries.

The person upstream who files the report gains nothing from it. The value flows one way, to the
people below.

Umwuzure is not an official warning service and does not replace one. It communicates what
community members observed. Always follow the instructions of your national or local flood
warning authority and your emergency services.

Recent changes:
Create or join a river course, mark fixed riverside landmarks, report water levels offline, and receive corroborated downstream notices with arrival ranges andconfidence.