by Russell Southwood (@BalancingActAfr) In this video interiew, Joris Komen, an education and environment innovator based in Namibia, discusses his work using Ushahidi crowd-mapping in conjunction with social media to reduce the number of vultures being poisoned as a result of poaching in southern Africa.
He says: ‘Poachers are using organo-phosphates and cyanide to poison carcasses of elephants and rhino that they strip of tusks and horns, because circling vultures alert the authorities to a kill…
“Ushahidi is a very basic mapping service that allows people to go online to record a sighting of an animal or incident. We’ve adapted it to allow tourists to record sightings of vultures that have been tagged, to helps us identify individual vultures and their movements.
“This tagging system allows a concerned community to make a difference, using social media to increase the return on investment in tagging birds.”
Russell Southwood is the founder of Balancing Act and the web TV channel Smart Monkey TV, and has been an analyst in telecoms, internet and broadcast in Africa for the last 14 years. Smart Monkey TV aims to capture the energy at the crossroads between African culture and technology. MarkLives is syndicating content from Smart Monkey TV on a weekly basis for the column “Smart Africa TV”.
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