Every day, millions of African pastoralists live on the verge of survival searching for green pasture for their animals in the face of extreme drought and climate change. With support from the U.S. Agency for International Development’s (USAID) Development Innovation Ventures (DIV) and Google, PCI provides maps generated by satellite data to pastoralists to help them find grazing land. The Satellite Assisted Pastoralist Resource Management (SAPARM) program brings local communities, the governments of Tanzania and Ethiopia, the World Food Programme, and Hoefsloot Spatial Solutions together to help millions of pastoralists improve their ability to continuously pinpoint adequate grazing land. Automatically updated every 10 days, grazing maps are generated using community knowledge digitized and integrated with satellite derived vegetation data, and distributed to pastoralists to improve their herd management and migration decision-making. In the first year, herd deaths were cut in half, and last year, Phase 2 of SAPARM was launched to expand in several communities, impacting over one million people in both Ethiopia and Tanzania.
