Netty Cheruto
- @Netty_Cheruto
- | She/her
Hey Everyone,
As part of planning for this group, our first step was to engage conservation technology stakeholders, to understand the needs, barriers, gaps and opportunities present in the region.
We completed a capacity needs assessment and here are some of the people we spoke to:
From the Assessment, the greatest conservation technology barrier pointed out by the stakeholders is the lack of understanding of what tools could be useful and impactful, which also means other things get prioritized for investment. They also emphasized that there is no clear place to go to access reliable Information about the most appropriate and up to date tools currently.
The survey also included feedback on some of the Conservation technology opportunities present and here's a summary of that:
Do these findings resonate with your experiences? What other conservation technology challenges are you facing? What opportunities do you see in addressing these challenges and how can we help you? What kind of resources, events and opportunities would be most beneficial to your work/projects?
13 June 2022 2:21pm
Out of curiosity, how many people responded to this survey and what kinds of institutions did they come from? E.g., government agencies, universities, non-profits, etc. And am I right in assuming this was just in Kenya or was it from a broader region? I'm not that familiar with the regions listed in the first figure :)
13 June 2022 5:23pm
Hey Carly,
Good question. Data collection for the assessment was structured into; Interviews (12 conservation organizations were interviewed), online survey (64 respondents) and workshop (22 attended a two-day workshop). Those who took the assessment were from conservancies; both private and community owned, conservancy associations, government bodies/parastatals e.g Kenya Wildlife Service, Kenya Space Agency and Regional Centre for Mapping of Resources for Development (RCMRD).
The conservancies and organizations are in Kenya but most have transboundary projects across East Africa. To complement the assessment, we also did desk research and spoke to a couple of stakeholders across the larger East Africa region and majority of the findings were quite similar e.g. need for tech training on i.e. GIS/RS tools (access, manipulation and use of data), data management and Protected area Management tools (selecting most appropriate tools and integration) and barriers to adopting up-to date tech due to the high cost and inadequate skills etc.
Carly Batist