AfriScout

AfriScout, a Global Communities Social Enterprise

AfriScout

Fusing indigenous knowledge and technology to support pastoralists improve livestock health and mitigate climate change

Nairobi

Kenya

Hybrid of for-profit and nonprofit

The UN warns that the degradation of the world’s grasslands severely threatens global food security and the well-being of billions of people. About 65% of Africa’s grasslands, which span 29 countries and cover almost half the continent, are degraded or severely degraded. Climate change and detrimental land management practices have accelerated that deterioration, releasing grassland carbon stocks into the atmosphere, threatening biodiversity, and impacting the livelihoods and food security of over 250 million people. Pastoralism, the practice of strategically migrating livestock to either graze or rest grass, is the most adaptive and sustainable food production system for Africa’s arid and semi-arid regions. But traditional knowledge and practices that inform grazing routes are failing at greater rates as climate change upends predictable growth patterns and human activity disrupts migration. Pastoralists who steward grassland ecosystems lose significant numbers of livestock and are pushed deeper into poverty because they’re challenged to find pasture or water for their herds. Vegetation maps show adequate pasture does exist, but if pastoralists cannot locate it, it can drive them into conflict with other herders or farming communities and lead to negative coping strategies like overgrazing, which further accelerates desertification and climate change.

AfriScout syncs crowdsourced indigenous knowledge with the power of satellite imagery in a smartphone platform and community support service that enables pastoralists, the nomadic and semi-nomadic livestock herders that steward Africa’s savannas, to make better and more timely migration decisions that improve the health of their herds and the grasslands that sustain them. Community-defined digital grazing plans are overlaid with near real-time satellite vegetation and surface water data are displayed in the AfriScout app with on the ground support from local field agents. Pastoralists use in-app communication to post geopositioned alerts on disease, conflict, predators, forbidden grazing areas, water availability and other information that advances collaborative rangeland management. In Ethiopia, AfriScout supports communities to plan, monitor and implement community grazing plans for themselves and visiting pastoralists across 1.7 million hectares of rangeland, with the app and platform motioring performance and delivering real-time updates to grazing plans and custom training content. With improved grazing practices proven to sequester CO2 pastoralists can mitigate climate change and earn revenue through the voluntary carbon market while improving the health of both their land and their animals.

AfriScout serves Africa’s pastoralists, a diverse group of nomadic and semi-nomadic herders that raise livestock for their livelihoods, food security, and cultural identity. Pastoral households are disproportionately poor and marginalized - 70% of pastoralists live on less than $3 a day. Pastoralists within the drylands engage in extensive (as opposed to intensive) livestock production, moving their herds strategically across landscapes to find pasture and water. The pastoralist population globally numbers around 250M and AfriScout currently serves 1.9M pastoralists from 54 different indigenous groups across Ethiopia, Kenya, and Tanzania. Pastoralist communities possess extensive traditional ecological knowledge about their environment, including rangeland management, animal health, water sources, and climate patterns, and pastoralism is key to African economies, particularly meat and dairy value-chains. Despite this, pastoralists are often marginalized & face increasing pressures that threaten their way of life. AfriScout’s solutions and interventions have been measured by Fordham University to deliver livelihoods impact through improved herd health, increased average herd weight, time savings among other drivers, with a total attributable impact of ~$4,000/user/year. Where AfriScout supports regenerative grazing practices, we are delivering further impact in the form of improved rangelands, increased community resiliency and financial returns through access to carbon & biodiversity markets.