This report evaluates AfriScout Steward, a digital app used in Kenya that provides crowd-sourced data on rangelands, and AfriScout Regen, an app that provides intensive grazing support in Ethiopia. Rapid changes in East Africa’s arid and semi-arid regions, caused by climate-related disasters, armed conflict, livestock diseases, macroeconomic shocks, and increasing population, are making pastoralism increasingly precarious.
Innovations to enhance pastoralists’ resilience are needed. To this end, Global Communities’ AfriScout programme supports pastoralists through two interventions. AfriScout Regen (in Ethiopia) provides direct technical support to communities. This support builds on and improves traditional grazing practices so that livestock movement promotes vegetation regeneration. AfriScout Steward (in Kenya), provides satellite and crowd-sourced information on rangeland conditions through a mobile phone app, to inform grazing and migration decisions.
SPARC partner Causal Design produced this report, with accompanying appendices, after carrying out a two-year, mixed-methods impact evaluation to identify the attributable outcomes of AfriScout on pastoralist decision-making and subsequent impacts on rangeland and herd conditions.