Extracting Gold from Africa’s Data Piles
Context
There is massive untapped potential for the world is the data housed by many African entities. Local Ocean Conservation has built one of the largest database of Sea Turtles in the world from its ocean conservation work on the coasts of East Africa but had no practical process of extracting insights from the data. Their work could provide immense benefits to ensuring marine conservation efforts, which impact food and livelihood sustainability for Kenya and neighbouring countries, and for climate change research largely influenced by the fact that sea turtles live through at least four habitats throughout their lifespans – they are an indicator species for the health of an ecosystem.
Solution
Ocean worked with Zindi to offer up its data for Africa’s top data scientists to compete to develop algorithms that could clean up its existing database, and better understand and identify every type of turtle in the photos to categorize them for storage and design a more usable database. Via collaboration with Microsoft, this database is now hosted on Azure cloud, with plans to collaborate on further machine learning to extract insights from the data.
Impact
Local Ocean Conservation has replaced its inefficient, manual process with an automated one. Through AI, it has found it much cheaper and faster to build its database, and even safer for the sea turtles as they no longer have to risk infection from tagging by humans. It was previously impossible or impractical to find this much information about Sea Turtles and thus the environment anywhere else in the world. Now, researchers and professionals from other parts of the world contact local ocean conservation for access to its database to drive insights with implications as important as better understanding climate change and ensuring food sustainability for Kenyans.