“Traditional methods of finding good grazing land like word of mouth, scouting, and ancestral knowledge have proven insufficient to maintain healthy herds in a changing landscape.”

The Challenge

For some, climate change is a political football kicked back and forth by policy wonks and debated in capitol buildings. For the pastoralist tribes of Eastern Africa, communities dependent on the health and well-being of their livestock herds, climate change is a whole other matter. In fact, it can often be a matter of life and death.

Pastoralists are nomadic or semi-nomadic populations who move their livestock between pasture lands, depending on the season. With the advent of climate change, rainfall patterns have shifted, forcing herders to shift their routes in response. Traditional methods of finding good grazing land like word of mouth, scouting, and ancestral knowledge have proven insufficient to maintain healthy herds in a changing landscape.

Project Concern International (PCI), a nonprofit based in San Diego, in conjunction with USAID, tackled this issues head-on. They set up a program in Afar, Ethiopia that relayed satellite photos to pastoralists showing current vegetation conditions, giving the pastoralists critical intelligence on where good grazing land might be. The program was a huge success with a 50% reduction in livestock mortality rates and 80% adoption by local populations. But the delivery system was cumbersome and inefficient. Maps were auto-emailed to the PCI field project manager’s office and printed, then those printed maps were delivered to various district livestock officers who would then distribute them to locals. The process was slow, susceptible to supply chain breakdowns, and difficult to scale.

The question was is it possible to cut out the middlemen and simply deliver maps from satellite to smart phones and, if so, could the new process be as effective as the old? The challenge was clear, the feasibility was not. Google.org, one of PCI’s benefactors, recognized the challenge as a perfect candidate for a Sprint. Sprint Master Burgan Shealy reached out PCI and got the process started.

“Was it possible to cut out the middlemen and simply deliver maps from satellite to smart phones and, if so, could the new process be as effective as the old?”

The Team

The sprint team needed to be quite large as the number of stakeholders was extremely diverse. First, and perhaps most importantly, two pastoralists joined the team, Peter from the Longito district and Edward from the Mondull district, both in Tanzania. In addition, three PCI Global field staffers joined, two from the Ethiopia regional office and one from the Tanzania office. Peter Hoefsloot, a geographic informations systems specialist was added as a cartography expert. Next, they invited a group of local developers from iHub, an incubation space in Nairobi that would be developing the software, including two iHub UX designers. Leading the initiative from PCI were Chris Bessenecker, VP, Strategic Initiatives, and Jennifer Waugaman, a program officer in the Strategic Initiatives office. Google brought Sprint Master Shealy and two UX designers of its own.

The Sprint

Because the sprint was taking place in Africa with a number of participants flying in, prep involved a lot of logistics, from selecting the right team to scheduling travel and ensuring the space could accommodate all the Sprint team’s needs. “I wanted to ensure we had the right mix of people, the right space and tools to work with, as well as concrete goals and a plan to accomplish those goals,” says Sprint Master Shealy. “I met weekly with PCI leading up to the Sprint to ensure we’d have the information and research we needed to understand the space and user needs and to plan the user testing phase which would take place in the field.” Because of tight scheduling demands, the Sprint was designed for four days so Shealy’s time management was critical from the start. With all the prep complete, the teams flew into Nairobi and got to work.

On day one, two things were quickly clarified: 1. For the app itself, there weren’t a lot of user journeys as the target user was very specific. With the help of Peter and Edward, the user journeys were quickly mapped. 2. Defining the core requirements of the build was super critical. After much discussion, it was determined that the app had to be: user focussed, easy to understand, and unerringly reliable.

The team chose these three core requirements for very specific reasons:

• User Focused: The maps are, in effect, a digital scout so they needed to directly provide the same service and information a scout would in the real world.

• Easy to Understand: Perhaps the most critical and difficult of the parameters, the app would be used by speakers of multiple languages and designers could not assume the end user would be adroit with smartphone navigations and UI. The app had to meet the highest standards of intuitive design.

• Reliable: The app would be used in locales where a dependable power source may not be available so it couldn’t be huge drain on battery power. Also, it couldn’t require large bandwidth as connectivity speeds would likely be unreliable.

As with all Sprints, tons of ideas and feature concepts were generated, but again and again they were scrapped in favor of simplicity. What would reliably work in the field was the goal post..

“Designing the app to be as straightforward and effective as possible was critical to its usability in the field.”

Day two was mostly given over to sketching, with some naming exercises added in. For the decision making, participants were given different colored sticky dots based on their roles - pastoralists, UX, Developers, PCI employees - which proved exceedingly helpful in seeing where consensus lay across different stakeholders. By the end of the day, the team had a working plan on what to build and a name that resonated with everyone: AfriScout.

As day three would primarily be about building the prototype, Chris from PCI asked if Peter and Edward wanted the day off. He assumed that because the Sprint was being conducted in English and everything was being painstakingly translated for them in their native languages, that they might be more exhausted than most as they had had to concentrate twice as hard as everyone else. But Peter and Edward were adamant that they wanted to be involved in day three’s build. They were completely engaged, felt involved, and wanted to stay hands on. As Chris put it, “I found that completely validating of the Sprint process overall.”

During the build on day three, Peter and Edward’s participation proved critical. The designers were struggling to develop an iconography system that would be universally understood regardless of language or region and Peter and Edward were able to confirm which icons resonated and which did not. The build went smoothly and by the end of the day a working app was ready for testing. “We only had three days to create a working prototype; it was important to keep the team focused and encourage decision making. With tight time constraints the Sprint Master’s primary role is to keep the team on track,” says Shealy.

On day four, the team took the app to a the Kijiado community south of Nairobi and tested it with users who had not only never seen the PCI vegetation maps, but had never used an app. To everyone’s relief, the testing proved very successful. “It really validated our approach,” says Jennifer.

“...The team took the app to a community south of Nairobi and tested it with users who had not only never seen the PCI vegetation maps, but had in fact never used an app.”

The Discovery

Interestingly, according to Chris and Jennifer, the main “discovery” occurred on the first day when the team agreed on the core principles that would define the app. “Always coming back to the three principles we’d agreed upon as well as reminding ourselves of the core purpose of the maps as we’ve seen them used in the field,” said Chris, “That’s what drove the process.” By placing clear limitations on the build, the team was able to solve for those problems specifically rather than getting excited about all the possible bells and whistles that would be nice to have, but wouldn’t necessarily serve the pastoral communities best.

The second big takeaway was the importance of involving users throughout the process. “We had local developers interacting with pastoralist users so they could fully understand the user needs from the very outset of the project as well as help us understand local technological challenges and opportunities,” says Shealy. This cross-cultural exchange proved successful during the testing. As Jennifer says, “We saw a difference when the iHub developer from Nairobi or Chris described the app to the Kijiado community versus giving it to Peter and watching one pastoralist explain it to another. That’s when the lightbulbs went off. That’s when we knew it could work.”

Finally, designing it with Tanzanian and Ethiopian pastoralists and then testing it with Kenyan pastoralists proved extremely valuable. Chris explains, “We saw the validity of this tool immediately, that the approach we chose transcended geographic and tribal boundaries. That was gratifying.”

“We saw the validity of this tool immediately, that the approach we chose transcended geographic and tribal boundaries. That was gratifying.”

The Outcome

The Sprint was complete at the end of September, 2016, and iHub has been developing, coding, and refining the AfriScout app further. The team is on version four and the hope is to have a version for release in April, 2017.

The team has been solving some further functionality issues like how to disseminate to communities that are not accustomed to going to Google Play or credit cards. They’ve developed a referral process that enables people to share SMS links to help people share and download the app. They are also working on incorporating a payment method through Mobile Money. In the context of the local household economies, the fee will be small, but by ensuring payment, PCI can sustain the program beyond grants and expand it to a broader user base.

Overall, PCI found the experience to be a valuable one. “By nature, our core values center around the community and the household,” says Chris. “We design our programs for direct service and support, so the Sprint process felt very natural as an enhancement to some of the tools and mechanisms we currently use.” We wish them the best in their efforts to help communities across the globe.

For more watch the video.