Mobile App
Empowering pastoralists with offline-first digital tools
A digital transformation project built for pastoralist communities in Marsabit, Kenya and in Namibia.
- InfoRange (DITSL, University of Nairobi)
- Agriculture and ICT4D
- Marsabit, Kenya and Namibia
- Mobile app, co-design, mapping
The challenge
Pastoralist communities in Northern Kenya and Namibia manage livestock across some of the most remote regions on earth. For these herders, timely information on pasture quality and animal health is a matter of survival.
Existing digital tools kept failing them for one reason: they all assumed a constant internet connection. The brief came down to three requirements. Connectivity independence, extreme accessibility, and data efficiency.
The solution
Compwiz partnered with the InfoRange project to build a suite of tools designed around resilience, accessibility and offline use.
Co-design, from the ground to the screen
- An audio-visual interface with voice guidance in local dialects.
- Sand-drawn symbols translated into digital iconography.
- Community grazing maps drawn alongside the herders themselves.
Smart mapping and community navigation
- Mapping data reduced from 300MB to 6MB using PMTiles.
- Interactive pins for disease, water sources and herd traffic.
- Dynamic expiry periods for community-reported information.
- Audio descriptions of local landmarks.
The vet app
- Disease reporting from remote locations.
- Audio descriptions in local dialects.
- Automatic background synchronisation.
Global scientific collaboration
- Rainfall mapping with the University of Kassel.
- Plant classification research for rangelands.
The result
- Faster veterinary response times.
- Evidence-based grazing decisions.
- Published international research impact.
By co-designing ICT tools with herders, we have moved from building for to building with.