Mobile apps help Kenya’s anti-poaching drive

NAIROBI: The LUMO Community Wildlife Conservancy, located in Taita-Taveta county in Southwest Kenya, is home to elephants, lions, buffaloes and antelopes, while also being a core target of poachers.

To monitor and protect the conservancy, 16 community rangers worked through day and night. The conservancy covers an area of 46,000 acres. Monitoring of the conservancy is a laborintensive process and rangers can cover up to 40 km per day in their patrols.

Ernest Righa, one of the 16 community rangers tasked with monitoring and protecting the conservancy from poachers, told Xinhua that through the use of the spatial monitoring and reporting tool and Cyber Tracker mobile app, patrolling the expansive terrain is now much easier and more efficient.

The 36-year-old community ranger said work routine consists of conducting foot and vehicle patrols in order to protect the wildlife from poachers seeking ivory from elephants, bushmeat from the wild animals or charcoal from the vegetation in the conservancy.

“With the mobile app, we are able to know the exact areas that we have visited on a daily basis and so the other rangers can patrol the unvisited areas,” the father of four said.

During the patrols, the rangers record any sighting of wildlife on the mobile apps in order to track their movements. In this way the mobile app also enables the rangers to know the exact location where wildlife is concentrated in the conservancy.

Another ranger, Domtillah Saru said that the mobile app has functionalities that enable capturing data of any human wildlife conflict which may occur in the area. The technology prepared rangers for many challenges.

The African Wildlife Foundation have provided five conservancies with the mobile apps in the Tsavo Mkomazi landscape, three in Kenya and two in Tanzania.