Cell phones revolutionizing Kenya’s livestock sector

A goat herd in Somaliland by NatGeo

A new mobile technology has revolutionised live stock farming by pastrolist communities in Kenya.

The technology, which sends alerts for livestock diseases between farmers and veterinarians, will also issues alerts quickly about possible animal disease outbreaks and track wide-scale vaccination campaigns.

Using Global Positioning System (GPS) the technology helps to pinpoint with accuracy and speed early warning signs for animal disease outbreaks in a matter of seconds instead of weeks.

The application, EpiCollect, will help detect animal diseases quickly and these early warning can prevent death of tens of thousands of animals, thus safeguarding livelihoods and food security, and preventing diseases that can sometimes be passed to humans.

 “The mobile phone technology aid in reporting animal disease outbreaks, tracking vaccination campaigns and delivery of veterinary treatments, such as de-worming animals,” said Robert Allport, FAO Kenya’s Assistant Representative for Programme Implementation.

“Cellular phones eliminate delays in receiving field data, since all the information is relayed via the mobile network, after the information is assigned a geographic location to be extremely accurate and available in real-time,” Allport said.

The mobile application is funded by FAO, the Royal Veterinary College and local NGO Vetaid to also track animals’ medical history via the mobile Web

In a press statement FAO says the project has been successful in Kenya where three out of four people now have a mobile phone and more Kenyans are upgrading to Internet-enabled phones and prices for the technology inevitably come down.

Although only a third of Kenyans have access to the Internet at present, 99 percent of those Internet subscriptions are for access from a mobile phone which made the project viable.

EpiCollect is set to do away with what has been happening some five years ago when veterinarians would have to travel to remote locations, record data, and then travel back to district-level offices to process the paperwork.

“Now data is transmitted real time and includes total number of livestock in a herd, number of animals vaccinated and herd movement during search of pasture and water which is regularly update and stored online,” FAO said.

The EpiCollect database is not searchable in online search engines which keeps sensitive information safe and can only be accessed by national vertinary officers and field vets who are assigned unique location code for each project.

“Presently EpiCollect is only being used by field veterinarians with phones provided by Google Kenya for the testing phase but it will be available to village elders and well-established networks of community animal health workers,” it said.

FAO is also set to use the same technology for better link to livestock producers with markets and livestock traders.

“Traders and sellers can relay information to central point about how many animals they have to make markets function efficiently with transparent pricing and collective bargains,” FAO Kenya’s Allport said.

The same technology has been used by FAO’s, Oxfam and Nokia using Nokia Data Gathering (NDG) to monitor water points in pastoralist areas as an early warning indicator for drought in Kenya and Ethiopia where communities monitor water levels regularly via Internet-enabled phones.

In the Karamoja area of neighbouring Uganda, the same NDG system is being used by local chiefs to monitor drought indicators to allow for early response.

Manuel Odeny © 2013

Researchers use mobile phones to show map of malaria spread

A pioneer mobile phone research to map the spread of malaria in the country has shown the disease is moving from danger zones like Lake Victoria and Coast areas to central highlands like Nairobi.

Carried out between June 2008 and June 2009 researchers from Kenya Medical Research Institute (KEMRI), Wellcome Trust Research Programme, Harvard School of Public Health and six other institutions said the findings can be used to fight malaria in the country.

“The analysis provided in the journal ‘Science’ shows how we might use this information to mitigate and prepare areas subjected to the highest imported infection risk like Nairobi,” Dr Abdisalan Noor from KEMRI says.

The research mapped every call or text made by each of 14, 816, 521 Kenyan mobile phone subscribers to one of 11, 920 cell towers located in 692 different settlements and every time an individual left his or her primary settlement, the destination and duration of each journey was calculated.

This way the research didn’t factor only on information about the location of mosquitoes that carry malaria parasite but also behavior of people who can be infected through resident's probability of being infected and the daily probability that visitors travelling to particular areas would become infected.

An online press release by Harvard School of Public Health (HSPH) says the study enabled the researchers to build a map of parasite movements between 'source' areas like coast and lake Victoria area which mostly emit disease, and 'sink' areas like Nairobi, which mostly receive disease.

"As Kenya begins to succeed in reducing malaria transmission in some areas but not others, cell-phone mapping of human movement between high and low-risk regions becomes a valuable planning tool," Professor Bob Snow, KEMRI-University of Oxford-Wellcome Trust Collaborative Programme said.

"Since many infected people have no symptoms, they can unintentionally carry the parasite during their travels and infect hundreds of others," he adds.

Lead researcher Prof Caroline Buckee who is an HSPH assistant professor of epidemiology, say the pioneer research through the geographic spread of the disease will understand the spread of malaria to improve traditional approaches to malaria control, which involve focusing on reducing disease in particular areas, are not sufficient.

USAID official training locals on net use

“The information available from this research will help public health officials decide where and how to control imported cases of malaria. For instance, official could send text message warning to the phones of people travelling to high risk areas, suggesting that they use a bed net,”  Prof Buckee says.

According to Buckee, Kenya was chosen as the subject of this study because its level of malaria prevalence is very geographically varied, it has excellent data on the disease’s spread, and nearly all Kenyans have cell phones.

The same method of harnessing mobile data was copied from Haiti to map how people where moving around after earth quake.

Malaria kills about 1 million people each year and threatens 40 million globally. Of those affected, 95 per cent are children under five in sub-Saharan Africa, report said.

© Manuel Odeny,  2012