IoT in Africa: The Kenya Animals, The Poachers, and IoT
If am to start with numbers, what I know is that there are over one million species of animals in Africa; ranging from the smallest, shortest to the heaviest and tallest land animals on earth. Africa, I know to be the best Safari continent, put that in mind in case you are planning for a Safari. Tanzania, Kenya, Botswana, and Zambia being on top of the list all took time to preserve wildlife in their countries. Talking about Kenya, Kenya is known to have over twenty-five thousand different species of animals.
The Kenya Animals
Kenya is the original Safari country. It maintains its rank among the best wildlife viewing countries today. There are lots of game reserves in Kenya but permit me to talk little about only one. You will often come about this one whenever you are reading about Kenya animals. Okay, enough talking, it's high time I talked about the Maasi Mara.
Maasi Mara, locally known as The Mara is a large national game reserve in Narok, Kenya. The reserve got its name in honor of the Maasi people, the local inhabitants of the area. Maasi Mara is well known in Kenya for its abundance of wildlife and it attracts lots of Tourism. Different factors have affected wildlife in Maasi Mara ranging from Poaching, Human Settlements, and Climate change. There are lots of other game reserves in Kenya, other Safaris include The Lakes System of the great rift Valley, Laikipia Plateau, Lake Tukana National Park, and others.
The Poachers
The name might imply reservation but over the years, game reserves in Kenya suffers from Poachers. These people kill animals illegally, some reasons for this are … let's just leave that to them. Animals go into extinction; the cause is not only due to poaching because Climate change and human settlements are all factors. In his article on poaching and wildlife conservation in Kenya, Dai Kurokawa writes “Poaching is not a sport but an environmental crime since it poses a major threat to the animal’s population”. In Kenya, about 280 Elephants and almost 60 Rhinos were killed by poachers in 2013.
What then is the place of IoT?
Combating wildlife poaching and trafficking is in two phases: Reducing supply (Enhancing Wildlife protection on the ground) and reducing demand (Increasing public awareness in the consumer market).
The use of the Internet of Things (IoT) has brought about a great reduction in poaching. One implementation of IoT in preserving wildlife in Kenya is “Smart”. Smart is a spatial monitoring and reporting tool that can be used to record the whereabouts of every animal. It has a geolocator that can track animals’ positions, dead or alive. With this, animals in danger can be easily identified from the control station and all necessary efforts will be deployed.
With the help of IoT as an emerging technology from what I wrote in the last article, Kenya has been able to combat poaching and animal trafficking. If the same had been done many years ago, probably, I would have seen Eagle by now, I just read about Eagles and haven’t seen one myself. With just a piece of the belt tied on animals’ necks, animals’ movement can be tracked, their health can be monitored and an alert system can be created. Oh, IoT.
If this will be the end of this article, then I would use this time to say big kudos to Kenya Wildlife Service (KWS) and Smart Parks for implementing an Animal-saving IoT service. Not only in animals’ safety, but also African countries should embrace IoT and Big Data as that will prepare them for the coming era.
Is South Africa really an outlier? Let me write on this next.
See you.
