Alina: Technology is key to effective conservation efforts

A technology and conservation expert, Alina stumbled onto a path that has led her into conservation technology. Having been exposed to nature and wildlife from a young age, Ms Alina officially set foot in the nature industry through the Grumeti Fund.

The exposure that Grumeti offered helped her to begin visualising how her skills and expertise in technology could be merged to make her work a lot more effective. After a year with Grumeti, she went on to pursue her masters at the African Leadership University (ALU) in Rwanda.

As part of her studies, she had the task of putting together a capstone project which also needed to be something that solves real-life problems. This presented an opportunity for her to put together her skills and passion to create something sustainable.

This was the birthplace of ConTech Africa. Through help in research from experts in nature and wildlife management, Ms Alina was able to identify problem areas and existing issues that technology can help solve.

After her studies, she went back to work at the Grumeti Fund, an organisation that is actively involved in preserving 350,000 acres of previously neglected Serengeti wilderness through active conservation management, collaboration with local communities, technological innovations and the deployment of well-trained boots-on-the-ground.

“I’m a tech person and I love machines. They either work or they don't. They don’t send you mixed signals, which I’ve always found easier to deal with,” she says.

“Growing up, I went on a few trips into the wild and I later learnt that there was very little known about conservation and as a techie, it was even more glaring that tech in conservation is a foreign concept,” she says.

“In 2017, a vacancy on the conservation arm of the Grumeti Fund was announced, looking for someone to run an operations room and I had no idea what that meant. All I knew was that I had the technical knowledge but how my skills would be applied in conservation, I had no idea.”

She did join in this position and her career in conservation technology kicked off. “This is a very nuanced space and I have seen that the perceptions and views that many have had with regards to conservation have been very narrow,” she adds.

“The reality was, you’d often find one person, for example an ecologist, who would be doing biodiversity work, law enforcement and so much more, which wasn’t often effective or practical.”

“This put conservation work in a bubble and at the time, if somebody had told me that I would be working in conservation in the future, I would have said no way,” Ms Alina shares.

When she finally began to work in conservation, she realised that a lot of the work was very manual and required physical presence in nature.

“Merging these two, seemingly opposite fields, has brought about a level of efficiency but because this is a nuanced space and conservation looks different for different places, it was important to find the right tools,” Ms Alina explains.

Application of technology in conservation work determines how effective and successful the efforts will be in any given region. “Sometimes, you would have interested parties present a tech tool for conservation but when tested in the field, it flops and so each tool must be subjective to the location of conservation activities,” she adds.

Additionally, Ms Alina says that the right tool alone are not enough; skill and talent is required to sustain and keep the tools running effectively to save costs that many organisations incur to fly in experts for frequent maintenance.

This is the gap that Ms Alina has managed to fix with ConTech Africa. Her company deals with capacity building in the area of tech skills for conservation as well as consultation for appropriate tools and their application in conservation work.

She is also a deployment partner for EarthRanger, which is a tool that she works with closely in multiple countries in Africa including Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, Cameroon, Namibia and Mozambique.

EarthRanger is a real-time software solution that aids protected area managers, ecologists, and wildlife biologists in making more informed operational decisions for wildlife conservation. It collects, integrates and displays all historical and real-time data available from a protected area including wildlife, ranger patrols, spatial data, and observed threats.

“A lot of the tools you find often operate in isolation, such that when an injury, for instance, has occurred, the manager has to move from a tool that tracks the animal, to one that locates the team on the ground to give them information, then move to another that tracks the closest path between the ranger and the animal and relay that to the team,” she shares.

This has proven at times to be ineffective because it consumes precious time that could otherwise be used to save this animal. “What EarthRanger has done is bring all these tools together and from my device, I am able to track the animals and provide real-time assistance to the team on the ground, with access to all past critical data about any animal in the system.”

“With data from all sensors, mobile devices, and field reports that I can see collectively in real-time, I get a complete picture of all of the activity within a protected area and I can collaborate with or mobilise multiple team members, and teams from neighbouring protected areas can also share data about tracked wildlife to activate joint patrol missions or responses to incidents,” Ms Alina explains.

More data also leads to better analysis and key insights into meaningful trends, such as animal behaviour, ecological changes, and more. This then informs patrol planning decisions and increases effectiveness of incident and threat management efforts to patrol as well as planning and tracking team progress.

“The beauty with EarthRanger is that it is customisable to the different locations it is used and so what Tanzania’s Serengeti experiences, is not the same with Zambia or Uganda or Cameroon,” she adds.

For Tanzania, conservation technology presents plenty of advantages. In addition to providing crucial information for wildlife management and incident response, it can also play a proactive role.

Some of the benefits Ms Alina notes are operational transparency which will lead to boosted accountability,ease of wildlife and parks management, better animal tracking for safety and reduced incidents of poaching.

Conservation, if done right, can offer a myriad of tourism activities such as better safari experiences as a result of thriving animal and plant life diversity, photography, videography and even licensed hunting experiences. When not done right however, cases of human encroachment into wildlife zones and other human-wildlife conflicts will continue to rise.

Technology, applied correctly to Tanzania’s context, can help in identifying and enforcing borders, to get a better handle on these conflicts. “You can’t have tourism without conservation and the two must always go hand-in-hand during any conversation. What is important now is that we need an adaptation of effective tools to manage our ecosystems,” Ms Alina says.

“About 40 percent or so of Tanzania’s landmass is protected and conserved and that is a lot of land to cover with ineffective methods.”

“I believe if we can get to a point where we integrate this technology right, our wildlife ecosystems will thrive,” Ms Alina shares.