Wildlife Conservation: The Elephant and the Text Message
From Shareideas
Fauna & Flora International and ResourceAfrica teamed up to create "SMS Communities" a system for relaying important information to community members living near South Africa's Kruger National Park. The aim was that ultimately the system could be used to warn residents and Park staff via SMS of wild animals that may be dangerously close; as well as keeping local communities informed about park management meetings, job opportunities and social events.
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It is not uncommon for elephants and other wild animals inhabiting South Africa’s famed Kruger National Park to roam beyond the Park’s borders, coming into contact with children on their way home from school and adults traveling from farm to market. Elephants, in particular, can cause enormous destruction, damaging property, destroying crops, and even threatening lives. Such was the case in 2003 when a child was trampled to death near the park.
Such incidents of human-wildlife conflict can fuel resentment towards the National Park and wildlife conservation in general. However, NGOs working with the Park realised the potential value of SMS to enable park staff to stay in closer touch with community members via mobile phone, improving relations and increasing collaboration with local stakeholders.
Thus the "SMS Communities" project was conceived, with the aim that SMS technology could ultimately be used to tackle the human-wildlife conflict issue itself, allowing messages about errant animals to be broadcast quickly, widely, and efficiently. This initiative is led by Fauna & Flora International (the world’s longest established international conservation body), and the development NGO Resource Africa, through the Technologies for Conservation & Development project (t4cd), in partnership with software developers and the Park’s management.
The logic is this: if one key member of each community organization owns a mobile phone and can receive messages, thus begins a multiplier effect as the information spreads through each organization’s internal networks – one message reaching hundreds of people.
As a result, rather than having a problem go unchecked for hours, or even days, it can be communicated in a matter of minutes. Through the initiative, dubbed ‘SMS Communities,’ SMS messages were also used to communicate information about park management meetings, employment opportunities, and park social events. For local communities, this maximizes the benefits of living near the national park, and encourages support of conservation initiatives.
More about t4cd
t4cd is a partnership between Fauna & Flora International (FFI) and Resource Africa with funding from the Vodafone Group Foundation, Microsoft UK and UNEP-WCMC. Its goal is to promote awareness of, and accessibility to, technologies within the conservation community. Its interactive website (www.t4cd.org) offers information about a range of technologies available to conservation and development practitioners, including global information systems (GIS), mobile telephony, wildlife tracking devices and many others
How it was done
The interest in the application of mobile phone technology to conservation initiatives stemmed from an FFI report entitled “Mobile Phones: An Appropriate Tool for Conservation and Development?” (Banks & Burge, 2004) This report highlighted the enormous potential offered by mobile technology as a tool for sustainable development, particularly on a continent such as Africa where access to mobile telephony has, and continues, to increase dramatically and where communications have been historically poor. The primary objective was to provide a low-cost mass text messaging service, which allowed 2-way communication from park staff to communities and vice versa. t4cd identified the SMS Malls system as an appropriate mass messaging service provider – the platform is free of charge and the only cost is the purchase of SMS bundles.
To implement the idea, t4cd visited communities clustered along the western border of the National Park, with whom staff at Kruger already have a relationship through community fora, to discuss the proposed SMS system and collect the telephone numbers of key community representatives. These contact details are stored in a database hosted by SMS Malls, and which can be accessed at any time via the internet. The Park staff are able to send messages to all, or a selection, of the database contacts simply by typing a message in the appropriate place on the site and selecting the intended recipients. The collection of community contact details and initial set-up of the SMS Malls system were resourced with seed funding from t4cd.
Implementation of SMS Communities has been a fascinating and challenging experience. Much has been learned about what is required for such an initiative to be successful. Most important is to secure the trust of community members, ensuring that they understand what the SMS system is designed to achieve and are comfortable with sharing their mobile telephone numbers – the time that this requires, particularly when working with a large number of remote communities, should not be underestimated.
Secondly, technologies are only useful if they are used. This may seem painfully obvious, but a slow rate of adoption of the technology by its intended users has been one of the most significant obstacles faced in this project. This is partly due to institutional inertia in adopting new work practices, but also due to a high rate of staff turnover and the need to keep training new people to use the system. Whilst the system is not complex to use, it is very important that those responsible for managing it are confident in doing so. Due to challenges in overcoming these issues within the Park, the difficult decision was taken to close down the project in its current format.
However, this remains a work in progress and t4cd staff are now working with park staff and the local communities to investigate how this approach could be improved in the future. The team is also planning to collaborate with kiwanja.net to trial the innovative new FrontlineSMS mass messaging platform designed specifically for NGOs. This system offers an open source platform independant of any external mobile phone providers, offering 2-way SMS communication relying only on GSM coverage with no need for an internet connection.
t4cd remain convinced that this model has much to offer the conservation community in terms of enabling a low-cost, real time means of communication. This could be implemented in a number of locations to deliver a multitude of conservation gains, such as improved relations with local communities.
