Mobile app helps Kenya's drought-hit pastoralists find water, pastures

KAJIADO, Kenya – “I have sold over 200 sheep for the past two months to feed my cattle,” said Koikai Ole Masiodo, frowning.

“I even have to sell some of my healthy cows to feed the weak ones, or no one will buy them,” added the pastoralist from Kajiado County, southern Kenya.

Prolonged drought and erratic rainfall in this region of Kenya are forcing pastoralists like Koikai to travel ever longer distances to look for scarce natural resources.

That, Koikai said, is often “guess work”. But his fortunes are changing.

Ole Masiado is one of nearly 3,000 pastoralists using Afriscout, a mobile app mapping pastures and water points in semi-arid areas in Kenya.

Brenda Wandera from Project Concern International, a U.S. charity leading the initiative, said it was initially launched as paper-based maps that were updated and printed every 10 days.

“But the maps were expensive and did not reach many pastoralists as they were distributed to local chiefs and spread through word of mouth,” she added.

So in 2017 the team changed it to a Google-powered mobile app on pastures, water and livestock diseases.

“Permanent water sources are showed in dark blue, abundant grass in dark green and no grass in brown,” Wandera said, adding that the app also highlights outbreaks of livestock diseases.

GUESS WORK

Isaac Ole Koyei, another pastoralist from Kajiado County who uses Afriscout, said that “during dry seasons we used to send our boys to scout for water and pasture, which kept them away from school.”

“When the drought persisted we would rely on guess work and embark on long and tedious journeys resulting in our animals dying,” he added.

This was a “recipe for conflict”, he said, as men would find pastures already used by other pastoralists and fight over the dwindling resources.  

Afriscout aims to avoid that by listing the number of animals grazing at any location as well as how many the pastures can accommodate, Wandera said.

MAP UPDATES

Afriscout users get a six-month free trial period, and then pay a subscription of 3,500 Kenyan shillings ($35) per year.

“It was developed for and with pastoralists by asking what information they need,” Wandera said.

The maps are cheap to download using mobile data – about 10 shillings ($0.10) – come on a .png format and are updated every 10 days, she added.  

It was developed in partnership with iHub, a Kenyan technology innovation centre funded by Google.

 Jemimah Onsare, head of the Kenyan National Research Fund, said such drought mitigation innovations are critical to the country’s food security.

“It saves animals that provide food and a livelihood for pastoralists,” she said.

At an agriculture conference in April, Kenya’s deputy president William Ruto said more innovations were needed in the pastoralism sector to help herders access fodder and pasture for their animals.

“The livestock sector pumps 450 billion shillings (about 4.5 million dollars) into the country’s economy every year,” he said.

”In a world where there is competition for stretched resources innovation is the only way out.”

The app is also available in southern Ethiopia and northern Tanzania, with Wandera saying her organisation aims to enroll “as many pastoralists as we can in the coming months”.